Content of review 1, reviewed on March 20, 2015

The authors presented a detailed characterization of some samples of Fe-Al-Ti ternary alloys fabricated by LENS technology. The results are of interest for high temperature applications. A very thoroughful discussion is presented, with extensive comparison with literature. I think that the work should be accepted after minor revisions, detailed in the following. I wish to congratulate with the authors for two different reasons: i) they definitely showed no ‘salami slicing’ style: they could have made at least three different high quality research articles with the amount of presented experimental data; ii) their writing is very plain and clear, which makes even the scientist not expert in their field to understand almost everything: this is the style that scientific/technical reports should always exhibit.

1. The SEM images in Fig.1 appear all laterally stretched (expanded), each one to different extent. The worse is panel a, where the spherical particles clearly appear to be elongated horizontally. Please check and restore the images to their original and true aspect ratio.

2. Line 383: remove “from Sandvik Osprey” as this is redundant, the source of this material has already been specified correctly few lines above.

3. Line 385: Remove “standard”

4. Line 391: “powder flow rate of the powder feeders”: remove the first “powder”

5. Lines 401 and 403: in parentheses, please add the country of the company, after the company name and a comma. Same at lines 429, 432, 434, and 438.

6. Line 396: remove “cylindrical”

7. 414: “transmition”, fix.

8. Line 419: why the end is empyt? Check for extra hidden characters such as Tab, spaces, etc.

9. 436: decimal separator must be point, not comma

10. 438: “test load of 100 G”: what unit or quantity is G?

11. 155 & 445: “5 x 5mm”, change to “5x5 mm^2”

12. 456: “finegrained”, I think that “fine-grained” should be preferred.

13. 32, 137, 358, 458: “rapid cooling rate”: either you meen the cooling, and is rapid, or the rate, and is high, so replace with either “rapid cooling” alone or “high cooling rate”. Since the simplest is the best, I would prefer the first option.

  1. 145 “crack”, change to “cracks”

15. At lines 124, 151, 152, 157, 133, Legends from Fig.3 to 11, 1st col Table 1, 198, 204 226, 231, 242, 253, 261, 294, 299, 301, 307, 310, 316, 334, 347, and maybe elsewhere where I skipped to notice: The word “alloy” (“alloys”) should be replaced by “sample” (“samples”), always when acocmpanied by the respective ID number.

16. 189: remove “by XRD”

17. 190: “with grain size”, change to “of grain size”

18. Fig.4: I would remove the question marks, and, if possible, increase all text size a bit (axis title and values, inset legends)

19. Line 388: Before “The nominla compositions…” it should be written clearly that “Four samples of alloys were investigated in details, which have been called sample no. 1 to 4.”

20. 202: Remove “unidentified”; replace “because the presence of” with “by”; remov “was found in the investigated alloy”

21. 221-222: “the colors are based on a color-coded inverse pole figure inserted in this map”: not clear, rephrase.

22. Why Fig.7.b is much higher magnification than a? Not clear. Or, alternatively: it is not clear why DF is used in this case instead of BF.

23. Table 1, column HV0.1: add also the quantity name, in addition to symbol, e.g. “Vickers hardness”

24. Insert a blank line above (before) Fig. 8

25. Fig.8: exchange panels a with d and b with e

26. 340: “Figs.11” change to “Fig.11” Conversely at line 345 “Fig.12b,d” to “Figs.12b,d”.

Source

    © 2015 the Reviewer (CC BY 4.0).