An Insight from Rock Bolts and Potential Factors Influencing Their Durability and the Long-Term Stability of Deep Rock Tunnels

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

Please check the following attachment(1832703-comments) for the comments

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, Thank you very much for the precious time you have devoted to evaluating our manuscript. Please see the attached file for details.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors are urged to consider the following remarks in a revised submission of the manuscript:

1.   It seems that the article focuses on rock bolts. However, this does not reflect on the title, where “rock support systems” are mentioned. The best way to address this would be to just alter the title to “An insight from rock bolts and potential factors influencing their durability and the long-term stability of deep rock tunnels”.

2.      Line 96 should be amended as follows “… in various sources from publishers and search engines such as …”, since Google Scholar is a publication search engine.

3.      The resolution of Fig. 2 looks low. Could the authors please improve it? In lack of any specific software, such diagrams can be easily produced in MS Word or MS Powerpoint and the resolution will be high, while the size of the image is low.

4.      The resolution of Figs. 3&4 can also be improved. The main component that makes a difference is the text, as it is relatively blurry. It would be advisable to use no less than 300dpi to make sure that the end result is good for electronic documents.

5.      There is no discussion on the information presented in Tables 2 & 3. What is important in review articles except from bringing together most (if not all) of the current literature on a topic is to use the information collected to extract conclusions.

6.      In Sub-section 5.1, it is not clear how rock strength affects the durability of the rock bolts. Only one relationship between rock strength and the strain developed in the bolts is described. However, strain itself does not affect the durability of rock bolts, unless there are alternating strains (e.g. during an earthquake), or it a change in the strain would force the material to enter its post-elastic region. Could the authors please elaborate more on how rock strength affects the durability of the rock bolts?

7.      The title of Table 4 is missing.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, Thank you very much for the precious time you have devoted to evaluating our manuscript. Please see the attached file for details.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf