Bowl
Bowl turns up in 2 fields: nuclear, railroad. Here is what it means to the people in each one.
Bowl in nuclear
The steam generator channel head, the hemispherical space under the tubesheet where reactor coolant enters and leaves.
Plant name for the primary-side channel head of a PWR steam generator, a bowl-shaped chamber divided into hot-leg and cold-leg halves beneath the tubesheet. During outages workers or robots enter through manways to install nozzle dams, inspect and plug tubes. Dose rates inside are among the highest routinely entered in a plant, so bowl work is planned to the second and is a major share of outage dose.
"Robot's in the bowl on the hot leg side, eddy current team can start at 0600."
Bowl in railroad
The set of classification tracks at the bottom of a hump yard where sorted cars collect.
Cars roll off the hump into the bowl, a fan of dozens of parallel tracks that each collect cars for one outbound block or destination. The tracks sit well below the crest, so cars roll in on gravity alone, slowed by retarders on the way. Trim jobs then pull the finished tracks out of the bowl and couple them into outbound trains in the departure yard.
"Bowl's plugged, half the tracks are full, so the hump's going to sit until the trim jobs pull some of it."