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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.”
B. J. Kozioziemski, E. R. Mapoles, J. D. Sater, A. A. Chernov, J. D. Moody, J. B. Lugten, M. A. Johnson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 14-25
Technical Paper | Nineteenth Target Fabrication Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-3697
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inertial confinement fusion requires very smooth and uniform solid deuterium-tritium (D-T) fuel layers. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) point design calls for a 65- to 75-m-thick D-T fuel layer inside of a 2-mm-diam spherical ablator shell to be 1.5 K below the D-T melting temperature (Tm) of 19.79 K. We find that the layer quality depends on the initial crystal seeding, with the best layers grown from a single seed. The low modes of the layer are controlled by thermal shimming of the hohlraum and meet the NIF requirement with beryllium shells and nearly meet the requirement with plastic shells. The remaining roughness is localized in grain-boundary grooves and is minimal for a single crystal layer. Once formed, the layers need to be cooled to Tm - 1.5 K. We have studied dependence of the roughness on the cooling rate and found that cooling at rates of 0.03 to 0.5 K/s is able to preserve the layer structure for a few seconds after reaching the desired temperature. The entire fuel layer remains in contact with the shell during this rapid cooling. Thus, rapid cooling of the layers is able to satisfy the NIF ignition requirements.
