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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.”
Toshihiko Yamanishi, Mikio Enoeda, Kenji Okuno, Robert H. Sherman
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 29 | Number 2 | March 1996 | Pages 232-243
Technical Paper | Fusion Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A30710
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A control method was proposed for the cryogenic distillation column with a feedback stream. The top and bottom flow rates of the column are adjusted for the variation of external feed composition to control product purity. The flow rate of the side stream and the power of the reboiler heater are promptly and linearly changed with the corresponding variation of external feed flow rate. Ordinary columns with no feedback stream are first-order lag systems for the case where the top flow rate is chosen as a manipulated variable. On the other hand, the column with a feedback stream is a second-order lag system even in this case. The parameter-setting method of the proportional-integral (PI) controller was proposed to predict the unstable region in the control of the column. The method can also be applied to the case where the measurement of the controlled variable is accompanied by a long time lag. However, the longer time lag requires a larger integral time, and the larger integral time brings a larger overshoot and slower damping for the controlled variable. For this case, the promptness of the control can be improved by introducing the PI derivative controller.