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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.”
Wennemar A. Brocke
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 11 | Number 2 | March 1987 | Pages 311-316
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST87-A25011
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the case of a tokamak, plasma current and plasma equilibrium cannot be controlled independently of each other because the controlled systems involved are coupled. For a practical solution to the coupling problem, so-called decoupling controllers are suggested. To reduce the problem appreciably, a tokamak operation with controlled input currents rather than voltages is assumed. A decoupling controllers design procedure, based on a simple model of the coupled systems, is described, and a method is developed to identify unknown model parameters by evaluating measured time curves of the tokamak currents. Decoupling controllers are designed and successfully incorporated into the feedback loops of the Tokamak Experiment for Technically Oriented Research (TEXTOR) tokamak. Furthermore, the modeling and identification methods are also implemented for the Joint European Torus and the Axially Symmetric Divertor Experiment tokamak yielding results quite similar to those with TEXTOR so that just as useful decoupling controllers could be designed. These results encourage equipping the control systems oftokamaks other than TEXTOR with decoupling controllers and controlled current sources.