This week, we got to tackle one of our biggest IPPD milestones so far: the Preliminary Design Review! We spent the entire week carefully perfecting our PDR presentation and report.

On Tuesday during class, we spent the day presenting our PDR presentation to our peers, to gather feedback from the entire class as well as get an idea for the rough time required. This was a great way to catch up with other teams and not only learn their progress but share ours!

Thursday was dedicated to sharing our PDR presentation with our liaison engineers in preparation for our visit and executive presentation on 10/18. Over 20 people will be in attendance (including NextEra executives!), so we made sure to review everything for a great first impression.

Friday was our deadline for the PDR presentation and report. We scrambled to put the finishing touches on our assignments as Word and PowerPoint buckled under all four of us editing the dense documents, but nevertheless we submitted with time to spare. We also had the opportunity to review the presentation with our coach, who will be joining us next week via Teams!

Aside from our weekly recap, we have some exciting news. We have finally narrowed down our prototype search to two contenders- a “modular bricks” approach, and “rack-and-cards” approach. The first is modeled after a DIN-rail style module, and the latter is modeled after a rack-mounted telecom equipment box. Both of these options have their benefits and drawbacks, so at the request of NextEra, we will continue to develop each concept until we settle on a definitive answer. Enjoy some sketches courtesy of our very artistic team:

We’re going into next week with a lot of energy, enthusiasm and ideas. Hopefully we will have an even better idea of how to proceed after our meeting with NextEra!

See you next week!