Edge Effect Analysis and Edge Defect Detection of Titanium Alloy Based on Eddy Current Testing
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors present and interesting piece of work regarding the edge effect detection through eddy current testing. I have briefly checked the equations and seem correct to me. Thanks to the advanced simulation techniques employed, I could advise for publication of this work in AS under the following conditions:
1) The manuscript is well written in general, however I would encourage the authors to perform a careful proofreading of their manuscript for minor typos and inconsistencies (e.g. systematically introduced EM edge effect phenomenon…).
2) Please adopt standard scientific writing pcinciples. Variables should be italic while non-variable symbols such as e and i should be upright. I would also appreciate if the authors used a superscript instead of exp for the exponentials. Proper symbols should be introduced for Eqs. 9,10.
3) The effects of the excitation frequency on the detection sensitivity has not been properly discussed in the manuscript. Please expand your discussion on how detection capability can be influenced by selecting different excitation frequencies. More numerical results on this direction would also be helpful for the readers.
4) Equations 9,10 are a bit confusing for the reviewer. I would highly recommend the creation of a nomenclature section where all employed symbols are mentioned. I also generally find authors stingy with equation derivation and I would be more than happy to see more sub-steps in their derivation process when it comes to describing their formulation. Please do be more explanatory, especially with the theoretical part. Also, please avoid including equations within the introduction.
5) Moreover, I find the quality of Figure 4 a bit poor. Please double check the quality of your eps files.
6) 23 references for such a broad and historic field of research sounds on the short side for the reviewer. It would be essential for the authors to cite previous work in the field, such as the one presented in:
Abidin, I. Z., Tian, G. Y., Wilson, J., Yang, S., & Almond, D. (2010). Quantitative evaluation of angular defects by pulsed eddy current thermography. Ndt & E International, 43(7), 537-546.
Munalli, D., Dimitrakis, G., Chronopoulos, D., Greedy, S., & Long, A. (2019). Electromagnetic shielding effectiveness of carbon fibre reinforced composites. Composites Part B: Engineering, 173, 106906.
Li, X., Gao, B., Woo, W. L., Tian, G. Y., Qiu, X., & Gu, L. (2016). Quantitative surface crack evaluation based on eddy current pulsed thermography. IEEE Sensors Journal, 17(2), 412-421.
and several others.
Author Response
Many thanks to the reviewer. Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper discusses about a parametrization model to identify and to separate edge effects from effects from defects near the edges to eddy current measurements. For this a FEM simulation model is used. The final outcome is a set of optimal parameters for the measurement setup.
The manuscript provides a detailed description of the aims of the work and the methods which were used for the study. The final results give a set of boundary values which could be used to control an actual measurement.
There is no mention about how the FEM simulations are made. Is this a model of your own? What is the platform?
Compared to plot in Fig4, there is no peak in Fig8. There is a dip at 5 mm. In the Table 6 you mention the distance of the defect to be 7 mm from the right edge. This would place the defect at Y = 3 mm.
There are two main flaws of the manuscript. First, the experimental setup is too simple to give any meaningful results to be used as optimal parameters. The measured curves are almost too perfect, since there does not seem to be any noise factors in the model. Secondly, based on the manuscript, it is rather hard to validate the results. There are large number of papers with an actual measurement of eddy currents at the edges, with and without edge defects. Thus the authors could try to compare their results to these if an actual measurement is not possible. If you would have more variation in the geometry and location of the defect in the simulation model, the lack of validation would not be critical.
Some comments about the language of the manuscript. The authors should make a thorough language revision of the article. There is a quite a large number of articles (a/an/the) missing throughout the manuscript. In addition in the manuscript you repeat a term 'simulation experiment'. This is a method to study a computer simulation, not an experiment made with a simulation. Please revise these words from the text. In the first two paragraphs of Factor screening you mention factor/factors/factorial at least ten times. Please revise the wording to improve readability.
Author Response
Many thanks to the reviewer. Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Accept
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript has been improved and the authors have clarified the structure and the methods which were used. The corrections and additions to the text improve the manuscript significantly and thus I would recommend it to be accepted for publication.
