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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
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.”
Mengkun Li, Guanxiang Wei, Zhihui Xu, Jun Wang, Ming Yang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 6 | June 2020 | Pages 447-461
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1710975
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study introduces a radiation avoidance algorithm to help radiological occupational personnel (ROP) avoid high radiation exposure in a radioactive environment. The premise of this study is that ROP can be designated as a movable point in a two-dimensional radioactive scene with known radioactive sources. A trajectory of ROP is generated by the radiation avoidance algorithm based on an artificial potential field (APF) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). In the algorithm, ROP is subjected to an attractive force from a target as well as multiple repulsive forces from multiple radioactive sources. The attractive force and repulsive forces drive ROP moving toward the target along the trajectory. APF has obvious difficulties with parameter selection and a local minima problem. So, we used the PSO algorithm to solve these difficulties of APF. Additionally, we developed a radiation avoidance simulation program using the C# programming language. Simulation experiments showed the proposed algorithm could be useful to meet the challenges of radiation avoidance applications that can be described as trajectory optimization problems.
