Research on Magnesium Reduction Slag for Dephosphorization of Low-Silicon Hot Metal in Steelmaking Process
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Author, This is a very interesting and practical article. please correct and complete the text in accordance with the comments:
1. Introdaction
- formulas of chemical compounds - subscripts should be used,
- Design-Expert software - add a short description,
- BoxBehnken high-temperature dephosphorization test - add a short description,
- Pidgeon process- add a short description,
Part 1. Physical Properties of Magnesium Slag - correct chapter number should be chapter 2,
- 1.1. Phase Analysis and Composition - to be 2.2
- Figure 1. Phase analysis of magnesium slag: (a) magnesium slag A, (b) magnesium slag B, test method and equipment - add short description.
- CQKJ-II type slag 80 melting temperature characteristic tester. -add short description of measurement is, put results in the form of a graph to the text of article.
Effect of Different Components on The Liquid Phase Region - improve numbering trougout the chapter.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The contents in the present articles is not worth to be published.
Methodology is not well presented, and the organization of the sections in the manuscript is questionable. It seems to be not appropriate the regression for the present work. Limited data was used for the regression model, it was just 17 data.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for the interesting manuscript. Below are some detailed comments that need to be addressed.
- Line 37: What does “northern my country” mean?
- Lines 46-47: remove the sentence “SiO2, Al2O3, Fe2O3 are conducive to the formation of a multi-component composite slag system, the slag melting point is lowered.” because this sentence already exists almost in the same format one line above
- Line 49: “Especially for low-silicon molten iron with low silicon content” the same thing is said two times in this sentence
- Figure 1: add details of the analysis equipment and parameters used to obtain these XRD graphs
- Lines 87-88: remove the sentence “When the temperature started to rise from 1000℃.”
- Lines 90 and 92: It is not correct to use the word “precipitated” when talking about the formation of liquid phase. Precipitation refers to the formation of solids.
- Lines 101-102: “there was still a large range of composition that could not be satisfied the smelting conditions.” Rewrite this sentence, it doesn’t make sense
- Explain more about figure 4: do the different color lines represent different temperatures, what are the concentrations of MgO and Al2O3 (are they 2.5 and 1 wt%, as shown in Table 1)?
- Line 110: check the spelling of “raiesd”
- Figure 6 (and figures 7, 8): mark the liquid phase region in the figure. If it is the area in the middle, how does it compare to figure 5 where you have solid phases in the same region? Also, you mentioned that the liquid phase fraction is very small at 1450 C (in figure 2)? This is confusing.
- Titles on lines 174 and 183: they are lost within the text. Make them stand out more (bold or italic font, for example)
- Lines 178-180: How does this dephosphorization agent melt completely already at 1400, when the magnesium slag melts completely only at 2008 °C? And did you do the melting in air atmosphere?
- Lines 181 and 184: I don’t think the pre-melted slag is dephosphorized? Isn’t the whole point of this work to use the pre-melted slag for dephosphorization of steel?
- Line 184: “(slag-gold ratio 1:10)” What is this?
- Lines 187-189: How did you know when the steel had completely melted and sufficiently reacted?
- Line 242: Change “At this time to further enhance the basicity was led to slagging difficulties” to “Further increase in basicity led to slagging difficulties”
- Line 244: Change “Al2O3 is not…” to “Al2O3 does not…”
- Check in the whole manuscript that you use subscript when necessary (Al2O3 vs Al2O3)
- Lines 266 and 267: “the experimental repeatability was better” better than what?
- Lines 289-316: Fill in the required information
- The references are not written according to the journal instructions: please fix this.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript has been properly revised in accordance with reviewers' comments.
Author Response
Thanks for your comments and guide on my paper (Full Paper, metals-1878291). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our research.
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for the revised manuscript. The comments made on the first review round were generally answered.
The manuscript requires some English editing, but most likely the MDPI publishing team will handle this when preparing the proofs.
Some comments to further improve the manuscript:
- Line 96: still has the word 'precipitated'. Change it to 'generated'.
- Table 2: there are no values for Hemisphere temperature or flowing temperature. What is the point of even including these parameters in the table when there are no measured values?
- Line 107: the modified sentence is still not correctly written in English.
- Line 194: I still don't understand why you call the dephosphorizing agent 'gold'?
- My question on the previous review round: "How did you know when the steel had completely melted and sufficiently reacted?"
Your response: "The composition of the semi-steel is shown in the table below, and its melting point was calculated to be 1140°C. Therefore, complete melting could be ensured under the experimental conditions of 1450°C. The steel-slag interface reaction lasts for 6 hours after melting, which could ensure that the reaction occurs fully."
Please write these details also in the manuscript.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
