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General Kenneth Nichols and the Manhattan Project
Nichols
The Oak Ridger has published the latest in a series of articles about General Kenneth D. Nichols, the Manhattan Project, and the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. The series has been produced by Nichols’ grandniece Barbara Rogers Scollin and Oak Ridge (Tenn.) city historian David Ray Smith. Gen. Nichols (1907–2000) was the district engineer for the Manhattan Engineer District during the Manhattan Project.
As Smith and Scollin explain, Nichols “had supervision of the research and development connected with, and the design, construction, and operation of, all plants required to produce plutonium-239 and uranium-235, including the construction of the towns of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Richland, Washington. The responsibility of his position was massive as he oversaw a workforce of both military and civilian personnel of approximately 125,000; his Oak Ridge office became the center of the wartime atomic energy’s activities.”
J. D. Rader, B. H. Mills, D. L. Sadowski, M. Yoda, S. I. Abdel-Khalik
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 315-319
Divertor and High-Heat-Flux Components | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A18096
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The helium-cooled modular divertor concept with integrated pin array developed by the Karlsruhe Research Center (FZK) is unusual among helium-cooled tungsten divertor designs in that it relies upon an array of pin fins on the back of the cooled surface, instead of jet impingement, to cool the plasma-facing surface. The Georgia Tech group experimentally studied a similar design constructed of brass which combined jet impingement with an array of identical cylindrical pin fins using air at nondimensional coolant mass flow rates, i.e. Reynolds numbers, which spanned the range expected under prototypical conditions. The results suggested that the pin-fin array, at least for the particular geometry studied, provides little, if any, additional cooling beyond that provided by jet impingement.Given that this earlier study considered only one pin-fin array geometry, however, a numerical study was performed to investigate whether changes in the array geometry could improve performance. Specifically, numerical simulations using the commercially available computational fluid dynamics software package ANSYS® 14.0 was used to examine how varying the pitch-to-diameter ratio for the fin array and the height of the fins affected average pressure boundary temperature and the pressure drop across the divertor. These results can, with appropriate experimental validation, be used to determine whether pin-fin arrays can be used to improve the thermal performance of helium-cooled tungsten divertors.