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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.”
Shigeaki Tsunoyama, Tohru Mitsutake, Shigeo Ebata, Shirley A. Sandoz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 65 | Number 3 | June 1984 | Pages 374-382
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT84-A33392
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Applying an autoregressive (AR) technique to a boiling water reactor stability test yields two kinds of reactor stability performance indexes. One is characterized by the neutron flux to reactor pressure open-loop transfer function. The other is characterized by the closed-loop transfer function. Studies were performed on these reactor core stability indexes, using a one-dimensional transient model. To simulate these two kinds of stability characteristics in the time domain, the input/output relation for the system considered is important. In both cases, the output variable is the neutron flux. For the input state variable, in the case of the open-loop stability index, reactor pressure was chosen and adopted as a boundary variable to enable neglecting the feedback due to change in the reactor dome pressure. In the case of the closed-loop stability index, the vessel steam flow to the main steamline was adopted to separate the reactor response from the main steamline. Employing this procedure, both stability indexes were estimated by the one-dimensional reactor transient model. Comparing these indexes to those evaluated by the AR fitting and Fourier transform of small perturbation test data, it was concluded that the one-dimensional transient model predicts well the open- and closed-loop stability performance. Further, it was shown that the open-loop index conventionally used is a somewhat conservative one.