Modification of Poplar Wood via Polyethylene Glycol Impregnation Coupled with Compression
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
„Modification of Poplar wood via polyethylene glycol impregnation jointed with compression” describes a combined process of wood delignification, treatment with selected chemicals, and hot-pressing to obtain new wood-based material. The research seems interesting; however, the manuscript lacks detailed descriptions of the treatment, the purpose of the study, and some basic information in the Introduction part. More comments, questions, and suggestions can be found in the pdf file attached. Therefore, I recommend a major revision before publishing the paper.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The study has good scientific merit. However, it requires extensive modifications, especially the English language throughout the manuscript. The whole manuscript is very hard to follow as many sentences are very confusing, the authors should put more attention in fixing this issue.
Title – “jointed with” sounds weird, you can consider “coupled with”
Abstract requires revision
Line 12 – “…these properties can be improved by appropriate wood pretreatment” what properties? How?
Line 22 – “Comparatively, the modified wood pyrolysis rate might be a significant factor of its thermal
stability.” Confused, please revise.
Line 33-34 – “biological modified” & “commercially productized” – these terms sound weird, please revise.
Line 36-37 –“However, these modification strategies will be limited by its chemical pollution…” isn’t thermal treatment green? And furfuryl alcohol is also an organic compound? Please made your statement more concise.
Line 47 – “The most worrying effect of this kind of densification is the resilience of thickness in a humid environment.” What do you mean by resilience of thickness?
Line 52 – “becoming a specific tensile strength of densified wood…” what do you mean?
What is the function of Nano-SiO2 and KH550? it was not mentioned in the Introduction.
Line 79 – “Populus tremula Linn”, authority name “Linn” should not be italicized.
Line 80-82 - 50mm – please put a space between number and unit. CH3COCH3 – please subscript properly. Check the manuscript carefully to fix this.
Line 88 – “Number the prepared wood samples in five groups” – not clear, revise.
Table 1 – In the footnotes, the superscripted alphabets a-h should be mentioned in the Table too, or else the readers can’t understand what you meant by that.
Line 113- “pretreated with aqueous solution of NaOH (2.5 mol/L) and Na2SO3 (0.4 mol/L)” – pretreated in a mixture of NaOH and Na2SO3 or pretreated with NaOH followed by Na2SO3, please clarify.
Line 139 – “interrupted heating” what do you mean by this?
Line 139-141 – “In order to reduce the dimensional deformation of the wood…” I do not understand this statement, can you please clarify?
Line 143-145 – “Record the dimension and mass of each sample and calculate the average value….” Please revise these sentences.
Line 183-184 – “Due to excess nano-SiO2 and insufficient coupling agent KH550, the desired effect of DC-SP-5K but worse than the DC-SP-1.” I do not understand, please revise.
Line 192 – “pristine wood” sounds weird.
Line 193 – “density growth” sounds weird
Line 172 – 211 – there are too many confusing sentences in this section, please revise the whole section 3.1.
Line 218 – “As we known, the wood will compress more easily after the lignin was removed.” It is not appropriate, please cite references where is this statement comes from?
Line 334 – 336 – “It was reported that the increase of the content of nano-SiO2 …..” I do not understand this sentence. Please revised.
Line 348 – “suffer pyrolysis” – Pyrolysis normally occurred at very high temperature (>400 degree Celsius), you use only 150 degree Celsius, how is that being called pyrolysis?
Please improve the Conclusion.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript has been corrected according to the Reviewers' comments. I only have a few comments on it now. I recommend the paper for minor revision followed by lingustic corrections before publishing it.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript has been greatly improved. I think that it can be accepted at the present form.
Author Response
Thanks for your effort on our manuscript. We have revised some sentences and please check the revised manuscript.
