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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.”
Bin Zhang, Liang Zhang, Cong Liu, Yixue Chen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 189 | Number 2 | February 2018 | Pages 120-134
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1394085
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Angular discretization errors inherent in the discrete ordinates method are a major problem, especially for localized source problems and problems with strongly absorbing media or large-volume void regions, where angular discretization errors would be totally unacceptable. This paper proposes a regional angular adaptive algorithm together with a goal-oriented error estimate to solve the SN equations. Standard angular adaptive refinement techniques are based on estimated local errors. We compare an interpolated angular flux value against a calculated value to generate local errors. The adaptive quadrature sets can be created by subdividing a spherical quadrilateral into four spherical subquadrilaterals that have positive weights and can be locally refined. Techniques for mapping angular fluxes from one quadrature set to another are developed to transfer angular fluxes on the interfaces of different spatial regions. To provide a better detector response, local errors are weighted by the importance of a given angular region toward the computational goal, providing an appropriate goal-oriented angular adaptivity. First collision source methods are employed to improve adjoint flux calculation accuracy. We tested the performance and accuracy of the proposed goal-oriented regional angular adaptive algorithm within the ARES code for a number of benchmark problems and present the results of a one-region test model and the Kobayashi benchmark problems. The reduction of angular number is at least one order of magnitude for adaptive refinement. The benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed goal-oriented adaptive refinement can achieve the same level of accuracy as the SN method, which has significantly higher computation cost. Thus, adaptive refinement is a viable approach for investigating difficult particle radiation transport problems.