Hello IPPD faculty, students, and anyone else tuning in,

This week, we had our official PDR presentation in front of the Food Science board sponsoring our project. We were a bit nervous at first, but all went well. They were super friendly and provided insightful feedback into our project. For some of us in Dream Steam, it was our first ever professional presentation in front of a board having sway in our project and providing the funds, rather than just a simple presentation for a class project. We’ve spent the rest of the week taking all feedback into account in order to prepare for demonstrating our prototype at Prototype Inspection Day. We know there will be challenges in deciding what to keep and what to leave out for our first prototype demonstration, but we look forward to working together and tackling those challenges head on as a team. Some feedback was minimal in regards to our overall scope of work, but some will require us to shift our focus and think in new ways. It may seem daunting, but know that Dream Steam will show up and show out!

Hello IPPDers! This week, our team focused on finalizing our PDR presentation!

We focused more on our liaison’s expectations than rigorously adhering to the program’s requirements, we made great strides this week on our PDR presentation. After carefully considering Dr. McIntosh’s suggestions, we recorded an updated version of our presentation for him to review and offer more suggestions. The use of saturated steam instead of dry steam, a brief definition of active learning in a single sentence, and brief summaries of our functional decompositions and concept combinations, which he found especially enjoyable, were some of the major enhancements he pointed out. In addition to these adjustments, we kept improving our presentation for Monday by practicing our delivery and polishing our slides. One other key component of our presentation is our House of Quality, pictured on this post! We wanted to make sure to effectively communicate how our specifications are aligned with requirements of the project, which this visual does well. We also gained a deeper comprehension of the subject matter and increased our confidence in presenting our design development as a result of this process. To guarantee a seamless and interesting presentation, we also took the time to go over the flow and transitions between sections. All things considered, we are confident and prepared for the review next week.

Hello IPPDers!

This week, we had our PR PDR Presentation, where we shared our progress so far and where our project is going in the near future. After presenting in class, we received a lot of good feedback on our presentation. We also received a lot of constructive criticism, which was great because now we know what specific improvements we can make for our presentation next week. Later in the week, we also met with our Liaison, Dr. McIntosh. He also gave us some great input on our presentation, especially from the perspective of someone outside of IPPD, unaware of the presentation criteria/requirements. We agreed in that we felt somewhat constrained in the development of our presentation due to these requirements. Dr. Macintosh explained a clearer objective for us with this presentation, which is what we’ll be looking into developing next week. We are also looking to make clear assignment to make each teammate responsible of certain parts of the product at this point, in order to maximize what we can deliver for our review next week.

Hello IPPD,

This week, we made the exciting shift from just picking a concept to actually building out the system architecture and gearing up for our Preliminary Design Review. We rolled up our sleeves and started breaking the idea into subsystems, figuring out how everything connects and works together. Along the way, we talked through trade-offs, brainstormed solutions to possible challenges, and made sure our design still checks all the boxes for customer needs. It was a good mix of problem-solving and creativity, and it really helped us see how our concept will function as a complete system. By the end, we had a clearer game plan and a solid foundation to present for our PDR. It feels like the project is really starting to come together. We spent many late hours working on our designs, but it will pay off in the end. Right now it seems we are going to hone in on a 4-champer design for testing 4 different food samples at once.

Hello IPPDers!

This past week, our team started working on concrete design sketches for our steam blancher system. Each one of us developed our own ideas, and then shared at our liaison meeting. It was interesting to see that many of our ideas were closely linked, with similar features and considerations. Being exposed to the same prompt on the project, and using shared experience from our classes, we still came up with different concepts, which we are now planning to refine into a final concept through design reviews and other comparison tools. We received great feedback from our liaison, and are looking forward to coming up with a final design and making it come to life!

We’ve attached a sketch of one of our designs here as well!