This week in IPPD was all about preparing for our upcoming System Level Design Review (SLDR). Although we didn’t make major technical changes, we made important progress in refining how we communicate our project and ensuring we’re ready for the formal SLDR on December 2.

We started the week with our final liaison meeting of the semester. Michael updated our Honeywell liaisons on the SLDR schedule and reminded everyone that this was our last status memo. Since most of our time has been dedicated to presentation preparation, we kept updates brief. Joseph shared stories about a past Honeywell competition—including a Rube Goldberg machine that won in 2018—and Loi presented his latest ANSYS Fluent work modeling flow over a cylinder and the Von Kármán vortex street. We wrapped up with a practice run of our SLDR presentation over Teams.

On November 18, we delivered our SLDR peer review presentation. Zach opened with an overview of our project, the Kessler syndrome, and recent real-world spacecraft debris incidents. The feedback we received was helpful: reviewers encouraged us to clarify the cost function, refine the parameters we use to measure demisability, and simplify technical sections like Kriging and ANSYS. Dr. Lind emphasized “telling a story” with our presentation rather than overwhelming the audience with details.

Overall, the peer review was a valuable checkpoint. Seeing other teams’ progress and receiving outside feedback helped us better tailor our message for a broader audience. While we’ll take a short break for Thanksgiving, our team plans to meet on November 30 to finalize the SLDR presentation and paper.

We’re looking forward to the formal SLDR and the chance to present our work to Honeywell and industry professionals next week.