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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.”
Qingming He, Chao Fang, Liangzhi Cao, Haoyu Zhang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 3 | March 2023 | Pages 472-484
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2106733
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This technical note presents a unified framework of stabilized finite element methods for solving the Boltzmann transport equation. The unified framework is derived from the standard Galerkin weak form with a subgrid scale model, which is different from the traditional Petrov-Galerkin finite element framework that modifies the test function to construct the stabilization term. By this method, first, the unknowns are decomposed into their numerical solutions and residuals. The decomposed unknowns are then embedded into the Galerkin weak form with an approximation for the residual, which yields a stabilized variational formula. Different methods of stabilization are derived from different approximations of the residual. Under this framework, all the frequently used stabilized methods can be obtained, including the streamline upwinding Petrov-Galerkin method, the Galerkin least-squares method, and the algebraic subgrid scale method. Thus, a unified framework of such methods is established. The similarities and differences across the different approximations are also compared in this technical note. The numerical results show that the behaviors of different methods are similar with the same stabilization parameters and that all these stabilized techniques can yield satisfactory and stable solutions.