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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.”
T. C. Chawla
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 48 | Number 4 | August 1972 | Pages 397-402
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE72-A22507
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Through the use of potential flow theory, an expression for two-dimensional axisymmetric pressure distribution in an “infinite” plenum for a coolant-expulsion process in a single-subassembly accident is obtained. An expression for the temporal distribution of the corresponding spatially averaged pressure at the exit of a fuel subassembly is also obtained. The illustrative example considered indicates that the use of a fixed-pressure boundary condition instead of a time-dependent-pressure boundary condition at the exit (or at the inlet) of a subassembly is not valid for very rapid transients, such as due to molten fuel-coolant interaction or to rapid release of fission gas from simultaneous or near-simultaneous breach of several pins near the top of the core region. Furthermore, the results of sample calculations presented for an FFTF subassembly indicate the possibility that, for a sufficiently rapid transient, the transient pressure in the exit region of the subassembly can fall to the saturation pressure of the sodium and result in local boiling during the expulsion in the exit region of the subassembly. The expression developed here for the transient, spatially averaged pressure distribution in the plenum at the exit of a subassembly could be coupled with the one-dimensional type of analysis of the expulsion process in the fuel subassembly.
