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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Remembering ANS member Gil Brown
Brown
The nuclear community is mourning the loss of Gilbert Brown, who passed away on July 11 at the age of 77 following a battle with cancer.
Brown, an American Nuclear Society Fellow and an ANS member for nearly 50 years, joined the faculty at Lowell Technological Institute—now the University of Massachusetts–Lowell—in 1973 and remained there for the rest of his career. He eventually became director of the UMass Lowell nuclear engineering program. After his retirement, he remained an emeritus professor at the university.
Sukesh Aghara, chair of the Nuclear Engineering Department Heads Organization, noted in an email to NEDHO members and others that “Gil was a relentless advocate for nuclear energy and a deeply respected member of our professional community. He was also a kind and generous friend—and one of the reasons I ended up at UMass Lowell. He served the university with great dedication. . . . Within NEDHO, Gil was a steady presence and served for many years as our treasurer. His contributions to nuclear engineering education and to this community will be dearly missed.”
Allan B. Wollaber, Edward W. Larsen, Jeffery D. Densmore
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 173 | Number 3 | March 2013 | Pages 259-275
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-101
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It is well known that temperature solutions of the Implicit Monte Carlo (IMC) equations can exceed the external boundary temperatures, a violation of the “maximum principle.” Previous attempts to prescribe a maximum value of the time-step size Δt that is sufficient to eliminate these violations have recommended a Δt that is typically too small to be used in practice and that appeared to be much too conservative when compared to the actual Δt required to prevent maximum principle violations in numerical solutions of the IMC equations. In this paper we derive a new, approximate estimator for the maximum time-step size that includes the spatial-grid size Δx of the temperature field. We also provide exact necessary and sufficient conditions on the maximum time-step size that are easier to calculate. These explicitly demonstrate that the effect of coarsening Δx is to reduce the limitation on Δt. This helps explain the overly conservative nature of the earlier, grid-independent results. We demonstrate that the new time-step restriction is a much more accurate predictor of violations of the maximum principle. We discuss how the implications of the new, grid-dependent time-step restriction can affect IMC solution algorithms.