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MIT professor develops method to verify compliance with Outer Space Treaty
Danagoulian
Areg Danagoulian of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is proposing a mechanism for verifying that Earth-orbiting satellites are in compliance with the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the placement of nuclear weapons in space. Danagoulian’s “concept and feasibility study,” titled “Verification of the Outer Space Treaty with cosmic protons,” was published recently in the journal Nature.
M. Zarei
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 6 | June 2025 | Pages 977-987
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2397622
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Closed-loop control of the reactor-follow-turbine operation is attempted in this work. The reactor power is intended to follow the turbine load demand, whereas the coolant average temperature is to be maintained constant for reasons of design safety. To this effect, a standardized pressurized water reactor model is adopted wherein the reactor external reactivity and the feedwater mass flux are deemed the manipulated control signals. Offline system identification is carried out on the model input/output (I/O) terminals to extract first order plus time delay models thereof. A further relative gain array analysis is conducted to determine the most tightly coupled I/O channels. A proportional integral controller is thereafter designed for each channel, making use of an analytical gain/phase margin tuning mechanism. The results for different output tracking scenarios confirm a feasible and quite satisfactory closed-loop control practice.