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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.”
P. C. Skelton, J. W. Lane, T. L. George, S. W. Claybrook
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 1 | January 2022 | Pages 49-69
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1870862
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Post Fukushima the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued an Order on Spent Fuel Instrumentation (EA-12-051) requiring all U.S. nuclear plants to install spent fuel pool (SFP) water level monitoring instrumentation and ensure the instrument would remain functional following a safe shutdown earthquake (SSE). The structural integrity analysis requires an assessment of the hydrodynamic loads and wave impact forces that the instrument is subjected to during an SSE. Modeling and simulation of the SFP response to an SSE can provide this type of information if the simulation tool is able to capture the important physical phenomena, such as seismic acceleration, surface wave formation, fluid velocities, and multidimensional effects. This paper describes the capabilities of GOTHICTM that can be used to simulate the sloshing surface waves and subsurface fluid motion of an SFP in response to an earthquake.
GOTHIC is a versatile, general-purpose, thermal-hydraulic software package for multiphase flow that is a hybrid between traditional system thermal-hydraulic and computational fluid dynamics codes. It includes a transient, variable body force capability to simulate multi-axis acceleration, and is therefore applicable to seismic events; movement experienced on ships, airplanes, or spacecraft; and other events with system acceleration. Also, since the gravitational constant can be adjusted, GOTHIC can model systems placed outside the Earth’s atmosphere (e.g., spacecraft, space station, the Moon, or other extraterrestrial bodies). The variable body force capability makes GOTHIC well suited to model the hydrodynamic response of an SFP to a seismic event.
This paper describes the governing equations that are solved by GOTHIC as they pertain to accelerating systems. A series of benchmarks covering a range of experiments for surface wave dynamics, acceleration-induced motion, and other important phenomena are presented to demonstrate the verification and validation of GOTHIC for these types of applications. Finally, results from a sample application of GOTHIC for SFP hydrodynamic response are presented that provide the necessary inputs for a structural integrity analysis.
