This week, FLARE met on 9/15/2025 to work on our Product Design Specifications (PDS). This is an important document that transforms customer wants and needs into requirements and specifications. We made sure to draft specifications that can be measured by technical performance measures (TPMs). These TPMs can be used as goals to guide the research and development phase of our project, and benchmarks to guide our prototyping and testing phase. 

On Tuesday, 9/16/2025 we met before class to work on our project roadmap for this semester. This document encompasses our planned work until the systems level design review (SLDR). We also developed a project risk table to catalog our major concerns and mitigation strategies. In class, we presented our project as a team and were met with helpful questions. Later in the week we met with our coach and GE liaisons to review the documentation we created, get their feedback, and ask some questions. Lastly, we wanted to congratulate our members who recently participated in a Team Building Workshop & White Belt Six Sigma Training!

We’d like to introduce our team’s name and logo, FLARE: flight level aerothermal recovery of energy. This acronym is a reference to the pyrotechnic device of the same name and symbolizes the energetic qualities of our project. The color scheme and flight vehicle design are both an homage to our university.

This week we met with the IPPD lab manager on Tuesday 9/9/25 to gain access to the lab space. After that, we met as a team to continue discussing our scope of work, complete some group assignments, and prepare for our meeting with our GE Aerospace liaisons later in the week. During class this week we underwent a heavy brainstorming session to try and come up with novel solutions for our problem. On Thursday, 9/11/25 we met with our coach to share these updates, and on 9/12/25 we met with the GE Aerospace liaisons to formally introduce ourselves, ask some questions, and outline expectations going forward.

Hello everyone, welcome to our IPPD blog! We are Team 09, sponsored by GE Aerospace and coached by Dr. Bruce Carroll. Our mission is to develop a waste heat recovery system for hypersonic propulsion. 

This week we introduced ourselves, met outside of class to start discussing our project, and met with our coach. We’re looking forward to tackling this ambitious project! Be on the lookout for our official team name and logo coming soon! 

Meet our team: 

• Simon Gil Estiz – Mechanical Engineering
• Naman Goyal – Mechanical Engineering 
• Michelle Gutierrez – Materials Science & Engineering 
• Phillip Lipman – Aerospace Engineering 
• Nicolas Riveros – Mechanical Engineering 
• Kevin Rubin – Mechanical Engineering 
• Aaron Song – Computer Engineering