Kristen E Brown

• PhD
• Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at San Antonio

Emissions from energy production, conversion, and use are associated with adverse effects on human health and climate. We use the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model and the Benefits Mapping and Analysis Program (BenMAP) to quantify effects of three potential emission abatement policies in the USA. The policies impose emission fees design...

Vehicle automation has the potential to drastically transform transportation, with important implications for energy and the environment. There is considerable uncertainty regarding the impact of automation on travel demand and vehicle efficiency. We utilize the MARKet ALlocation (MARKAL) energy system model to examine four previously published sce...

Ideally, new electricity-generating units will have low capital costs, low fuel costs, minimal environmental impacts, and satisfy demand without concerns of intermittency. When expanding generating capacity, candidate technologies can be evaluated against criteria such as these. Alternatively, it may be possible to pair technologies in such a way t...

The energy system is the primary source of air pollution. Thus, evolution of the energy system into the future will affect society’s ability to maintain air quality. Anticipating this evolution is difficult because of inherent uncertainty in predicting future energy demand, fuel use, and technology adoption. We apply Scenario Planning to address th...

This study aims to determine how incorporating damages into energy costs would impact the US energy system. Damages from health impacting pollutants (NOx, SO2, particulate matter -- PM, and volatile organic compounds -- VOCs) as well as greenhouse gases (GHGs) are accounted for by applying emissions fees equal to estimated external damages associat...

This study uses the US Environmental Protection Agency’s nine-region MARKAL model to examine the effect of internalizing air quality externalities in the cost of energy. Fees based on damage estimates from the literature are applied to lifecycle emissions across all energy use sectors. The resulting emissions are examined for changes overall and by...

The EPA-MARKAL model of the US electricity sector is used to examine how imposing emissions fees based on estimated health and environmental damages might change electricity generation. Fees are imposed on life-cycle emissions of SO2, nitrogen oxides (NOx), particulate matter, and greenhouse gases (GHG) from 2015 through 2055. Changes in electricit...

Cold dense plasma sheet (CDPS) material is found along the flanks of the magnetopause during extended intervals of northward interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). The source for this population is the magnetosheath, and an un-resolved question is what mechanisms dominate in transporting, heating and accelerating it. Northward IMF is thought to be fa...

Initial observations of cold, dense plasma sheet (CDPS) regions by equatorial spacecraft indicated that they occur during extended intervals of northward IMF near the low latitude boundary layer (LLBL). Since CDPS domains have plasma characteristics intermediate between the plasma sheet and the magnetosheath, the latter has long been considered a c...

The discovery more than a decade ago of a cold, dense plasma sheet near Earth during periods of northward IMF has prompted interest in mechanisms for its origin. While transport of magnetosheath ions across the low-latitude boundary layer via viscous interactions has also been considered, recent attention has focused on the possibility of injection...

Overlapping, dispersive ion signatures seen by low-altitude spacecraft traversing Earth's auroral regions during extended period s of northward IMF can be explained by differing injection source and time of flight considerations, but observations suggest that the dispersion is most often spatially determined, and results from velocity filtering fol...

The breakup of a deuteron in the Coulomb field of a larger nucleus is a well-known phenomenon that has been studied for many decades. Deuteron breakup also has the potential of generating a forward-focused, relatively monoenergetic neutron beam at fluxes which are useful for many applications, including reactions on radioactive targets. However, mo...