Following our team’s split last week into two sub teams – the CFD and manufacturing sub teams – both groups hit the ground running to start the semester off strong! The teams have continued to meet separately in order to make progress in their respective tasks that can be shared during the full team meetings later in the week.

One of the largest hurdles for the CFD team throughout the IPPD project has been ensuring that we are following the proper steps to make accurate fluid models of our system. To tackle this, the sub team met with the lead CFD engineer for UF’s rocket team to ask questions and learn as much as possible about running Ansys simulations.

On the manufacturing side of things, this week the manufacturing sub team was hard at work machining and making preparations for future work. After taking the metal stock to the prototyping lab, the sub team worked on machining all of the top plates to size. The only remaining step is to use the CNC to machine the more complex geometries of the top plates. For that, the sub team met with UF faculty to make adjustments and finalize the CAM for the CNC plans. With this busy week wrapping up, the sub team is excited about looking onward to manufacturing the remaining parts and preparing for wind tunnel testing!