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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.”
Humberto E. Garcia, Richard B. Vilim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 141 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 69-77
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technologies | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3351
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two basic approaches can be mentioned to model physical systems. One approach derives a model structure from the known physical laws. However, obtaining a model with the required fidelity may be difficult if the system is not well understood. A second approach is to employ a black-box structure to learn the implicit input-output relationships from measurements in which no particular attention is paid to modeling the underlying processes. A method that draws on the respective strengths of each of these two approaches is described. The technique integrates known first-principles knowledge derived from physical modeling with measured input-output mappings derived from neural processing to produce a computer model of a dynamical process. The technique is used to detect operational changes of mechanical equipment by statistically comparing, using a likelihood test, the predicted model output for the given measured input with the actual process output. Experimental results with a peristaltic pump are presented.