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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.”
Raymond C. Wang, Yunlin Xu, Nathanael Hudson, Thomas J. Downar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 183 | Number 3 | September 2013 | Pages 504-514
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A19437
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Special Power Excursion Reactor Test III (SPERT III) was a series of reactivity insertion experiments conducted in the 1950s. This paper describes the validation of the U.S. NRC coupled code system TRITON/PARCS/TRACE to simulate reactivity insertion accidents (RIA) using several of the SPERT III tests. The NRC coupled code system was used to perform the SPERT III E-Core configuration tests in which the RIA was initiated by the rapid ejection of a central cruciform control rod. The resulting superprompt reactivity excursion and negative Doppler reactivity feedback produced the familiar bell-shaped power increase and decrease. The energy deposition during such a power excursion has important safety consequences, and the SPERT III tests provide a validation basis for the NRC coupled multiphysics codes. The models were developed using the original experiment documentation, and the results of five separate tests were used to validate the TRITON/PARCS/TRACE coupled code system.
