Monthly Archive for March, 2011

The Rise and Fall of the Saturday Evening Post

Published on March 14, 2011 in Business, Delays, Published and Vensim. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Replicated by David Sirkin and Julio Gomez from Hall, R. I. 1976. A system pathology of an organization: The rise and fall of the old Saturday Evening Post. Administrative Science Quarterly 21(2): 185-211. (JSTOR link). Just updated for newer Vensim versions.

This is one of the classic models on the Desert Island Dynamics list.

There are some units issues, preserved from the original by David and Julio. As I update it, I also wonder if there are some inconsistencies in the accounting for the subscription pipeline. Please report back here if you find anything interesting.

satevepost2011b.mdl

satevepost2011b.vmf

Boiling Water Reactor Dynamics

Published on March 14, 2011 in Chaos & oscillations, Energy, Engineering, Published and Vensim. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Replicated from “Hybrid Simulation of Boiling Water Reactor Dynamics Using A University Research Reactor” by James A. Turso, Robert M. Edwards, Jose March-Leuba, Nuclear Technology vol. 110, Apr. 1995.

This is a simple 5th-order representation of the operation of a boiling water reactor around its normal operating point, which is subject to interesting limit cycle dynamics.

The original article documents the model well, with the exception of the bifurcation parameter K and a nonlinear term, for which I’ve identified plausible values by experiment.

TursoNuke1.mdl