Treatment of Saline Irrigation Water Using a Sulfate-Reducing Bioreactor Coupled with an Iron-Based Desalination Reactor

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article presented water treatment systems for the demineralization of saline irrigation water using a sulfate reducing bioreactor (SRB) with an iron- based desalination unit. The chosen topic is very important in desalination of agricultural drainage water. However, my attention has been addressed to minor aspects. Not only due to the politeness of the writing, however, I warmly suggest to correct the following:

-          The manuscript has some errors in scientific writing. It has to be entirely rewritten.

-          A well written abstract that clearly stated study objectives, methodological approaches and presented key results; nevertheless, it should be edited to be shorter, for instance by removing some phrases such as: "traditional reverse osmosis (RO), ion exchange (IX) and other ultra and nano filtration (UF and NF) technologies." And " Water scarcity due to past agricultural practices, climate change and prolonged drought is driving an effort to identify and use less expensive but effective desalination methods to allow use of saline groundwater, seawater and impounded saline agricultural drainage and runoff for crop growth."

-          Page 3, in equations 1, 2, 3 and 4: Please change equal "=" to arrow "à".

-          - Page 5, lines 194 and 198: Please include HRT's and ORP's entire names.

-          Page 5, in Fig. 1: change seawater to "agricultural drainage saline water" or "Brackish water".

-          Page 7, in Fig. 2: remove the title of the figure.

 

-          A more thorough explanation of Fig. 3 has to be added to the Material and Methods section.

Author Response

see attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a good work, which falls into the scope of journal. It should be accepted after addressing the issues indicated in the following:

1.            Literature revirew should be enhanced by adding more recent research works.

2.            Gap of the research and novelty of the current work should be discussed in a more clear way.

3.            The legend for Figure 2 should be removed.

4.            Please indicate the phase for materials in the reactions.

5.            There are two sections entitled “2.1”. In addition, it would be better the full name appears instead of acronym. The same for section 2.2.

6.            What are the limitations of this work in addition to the poterntial sources of error? What are the suggested ideas to reduce the error? It should be indicated.

7.            Some ideas about the future research works should be added.

Author Response

See Attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

 1. For more information about the theoretical work that has done in alternative low cost  small- scale desalination methods and water purification from heavy metals you can also add the following references

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.desal.2020.114549

https://doi.org/10.3390/w13162185

2.   You need to put more emphasis on the innovation of the method.

3. You should refer to the financial cost of producing irrigated water with the above method

4. In the literatute should put more recent references

5. In Eq(1)-(4)  you have to replace '='  by---->

6. I think the method is applied to saline irrigation water and not sea water. You have to change the expression where necessary 

Author Response

See Attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

A satisfactory revision; The revised version has been now recommended for publication.