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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.”
Dhananjay B. Talange, B. Bandyopadhyay, Akhilanand Pati Tiwari
Nuclear Technology | Volume 138 | Number 3 | June 2002 | Pages 217-237
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3290
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The paper presents the design of state feedback control for a large pressurized heavy water reactor (PHWR) by developing a reduced-order model for the same. The nonlinear mathematical model of the PHWR is linearized around an operating point corresponding to full-power operation of the reactor. The linear model has 14 inputs and outputs each and 56 states. Application of the reduction technique leads to a simplified model characterized by only 14 states. This 14th-order simplified model is used to design a linear quadratic regulator, and state feedback gains for the original 56th-order system are obtained without any significant difficulty. The transient performance of the closed-loop system is tested by simulation of the original nonlinear model of the PHWR.
