Influence of Continuous Annealing Temperature on Mechanical Properties and Texture of Battery Shell Steel

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors. Your manuscript "Influence of Continuous Annealing Temperature on Mechanical Properties and Texture of Battery
Shell Steel"  is informative and well written. Section 3.2 would be nice to add tensile curves.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The authors are requested to improve the manuscript based on the following seven points:

Point 1: The English, punctuation, and grammar needs to be corrected in this paper.

Point 2: The abstract should contain the obtained strength results and What does “r-value” mean?

Point 3: The purpose of the work should be more clearly presented in the introduction section!

Point 4: Table 1. Add the designation (name according to the standard) and mechanical properties of the materials used!

Point 5: The resolution and description should be improved in Figure 1

Point 6: There is no standard for the tensile test of specimen in a paper?

Point 7: The following reference should be added:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmatprotec.2017.03.009  

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript “Influence of Continuous Annealing Temperature on Mechanical Properties and Texture of Battery Shell Steel” shows the impact of different annealing temperatures on both mechanical and crystallographic anisotropy of a battery shell steel.

While this topic is of interest for the production of such materials, the impact of the manuscript is strongly limited due to missing information on the initial microstructure. Without knowing the initial microstructure, any comparison to other studies is almost impossible. Thus, the reviewer recommends adding some information on the microstructure and texture of the starting material before publication.

Furthermore, the following smaller issues should be addressed:

L14 “continuous annealing simulation experiments”: What has the current study to do with simulation?

L16: Since not all readers might be familiar with the r value concept, a short description (e.g. “anisotropy index” (cf. L40)) might improve the understanding.

L36/54: Why does this only apply to “domestic” steel?

L41 “The value of r ...”: Please check this sentence. The r value does not depend on a strong or weak texture component, but it only might increase or decrease with certain textures.

L63 “60-100s”: Is this the scatter of the annealing time? Or was it varied intentionally? Since this relative deviations of more than 50% in annealing might have an effect on the structures, this should be briefly discussed.

L63/64: According to the first sentence there was “slow cooling”, according to the next sentence “they were cooled rapidly”. What is true?

L66: What was the width of the tensile samples? Was the surface prepared or just tested in as-annealed state?

L74: Since bad counting statistics of small EBSD scans might result in strange results, the approximate number of analyzed grains for each structure should be given.

L85 Please mention briefly how you defined the grain size, since the microstructure is clearly anisotropic and you could determine different grain sizes in different directions.

L86 “the proportion of the grains having a diameter of 7.9um increased”: The fraction of grains with 11.2um increased as well, but is not mentioned. Do you mean, that the fraction of grains with 7.9um is now the largest?

L87 “The average grain size can also be given according to the results of EBSD.”. That you can determine an average, if you know the complete distribution, should be obvious to all readers. More interesting would be to actually read the average grain sizes (e.g. as text in the four graphs in Fig. 2).

L99: The abbreviations (YS, TS, YR, EL) are only used in Fig 3a and should, thus, explained there in the figure caption and not in the text (or even better: no abbreviations in the legend of Fig 3a).

L120: It is unclear if the results in Figure 3a are averaged over all three testing directions (0 deg, 45 deg, 90 deg?) or if they are just from one testing directions. For both Fig 3a and 3b, the information from the 3 tests per conditions should be used to indicate the accuracy of the values (error bars).

L136/L160: The {111}<112> component seems to be much stronger in the 730C sample compared to 760C, which is against the general trend. This should briefly be discussed.

L116 “In the figures, ...”: The reviewer recommends shifting this sentence to the figure caption, since it is required to understand the figure, but not to understand the discussion.

L184: The reviewer recommends pointing out more clearly that the observed increase of {111}/{100} fits well with the also measured increase of r values.

Additionally, the authors should check their manuscript again with respect to the use of correct English language, e.g. the following: L30 “new energy auto”, L34 “when”, L43 “while”, L46 “developing”, L47/L181 “researches”, L48 “are”, L63 “respectively”, L75 “were”, L179 “Plastic rheology”, L184 “development of r value”

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The quality of the manuscript has significantly improved compared to the original version. In the reviewers opinion, just two minor points should be checked before publication:

Where do you refer to the new reference 17? I could not find any "[17]" in the text. Please check again the English. In particular around the modified passages, some modifications introduced some not so smooth formulations.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx