WE DID IT, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!!!!!!

PDR complete, and it went swimmingly. Oh yeah, you heard that right, swimmingly. One more time? Maybe this time in all caps?

Okay then, SWIMMINGLY.

On Monday, October 12th, at 10am, team SWAMP gathered at Crystal River North to present our preliminary design to our Duke Energy liaisons. After weeks of hard work preparing our PDR, we were able to showcase our progress in a 30 minute presentation. Following the presentation, we held a 25–30 minute Q&A and discussion session, where our liaisons provided valuable feedback, asked insightful questions, and helped us identify areas for improvement. The team was able to take notes during this time. This left us with much to consider moving forwards, so the meeting was a great opportunity to reflect on how far our design has come and what still lies ahead.

While this is a big accomplishment, our work is not done yet! Following our presentation, Team SWAMP got right back to business, developing a feedback implementation plan to address the comments and recommendations received during the review. Overall, this was one of the most important weeks of the year so far, and it went…….. swimmingly.

One step closer to the final design! Go Team SWAMP!

On the eve of our IPPD final report presentation, Team SWAMP was busy at work preparing for the day ahead!

Amidst the surge of assignments engineering students are all-too-familiar with, SWAMP was pondering what awaited us at Crystal River tomorrow. If, by pondering, we mean assembling a comprehensive slideshow review, and by what awaited us, we mean synthesizing a month’s work of conceptual designs, regulations, and literature review in to a palpable 30 minute presentation… then YES, we were! Our team synchronized a set schedule, allocated speaking roles, divvied up question-fielding, and discussed professional expectations for tomorrow. For Team Swamp, this conference at Marston was not just a formality, however, but a joyous appreciation of the past week’s accomplishments. Leading up to this near-celebratory event, Team Swamp put in many extra hours to finalize the content to be presented to Duke Energy and the manner in which it will be presented. We can’t wait to present our design report.

Duke Energy, here we come!

Last week we presented our IPPD power plant project on pipes and pumps to our peers. Try saying that five times fast!

Let’s rewind to why we even did that presentation. To show our concept designs to our sponsors, our team made a Preliminary Design Review (PDR) report with all the details of our understanding of the Scope of Work, our background research in our Literature Review, our understanding of the necessary Product Design Specifications, and finally our Concept Generation and selection. Of course, it’d be a lot better if we could showcase all this information this in a digestible fashion, like some sort of presentation, maybe even a PDR presentation if you will. This PDR presentation was such a good idea, all the other IPPD teams made one for their project too. It’s almost like it was some sort of IPPD course assignment😉.

While I’m sure we would all enjoy the improv exercise of presenting to our sponsors with no practice, we opted to do a dry run of our PDR presentation to our peer teams and their coaches, and they kindly gave us feedback. We also gave feedback on our peers presentations. Well, not every single IPPD presentation, as for the sake of efficiency, the IPPD program was split into several rooms of four teams each, and sadly, we could not be in every single place at once.

We are polishing our PDR report and presentation as we speak (as we blog?), and we are very excited to show Duke Energy what we’ve got so far!

This weekend, students in the IPPD program had the opportunity to complete Six Sigma White Belt Training, and 4 members of our team had the opportunity to attend this event. We learned about evaluating and optimizing any process, from assembling donation food boxes to owning our own car dealership. We listened to the expertise of Dr. Linda Linnus and Dr. Doreen N. Ayafor, did some dynamic exercises to learn how to effectively assess and improve an inefficient process, and shared anecdotes over provided meals! We had so much fun and learned important information that we will take with us for the rest of our careers. Special thanks to IPPD program leadership for putting this event together, and to our talented speakers for being willing to drive 7+ hours to teach us all there is to know about White Belt level Lean Six Sigma!

Our team recently had the opportunity to visit Duke Energy’s Crystal River North plant for our teams first site visit!

During the visit, we not only got to meet more of the Duke Energy team involved in our project, but also received an in-depth tour of the site. Seeing the plant in person gave us a much better understanding of the systems we have been studying and helped us visualize how our project fits into the larger facility. 

The visit also gave us the opportunity to finally meet our IPPD coach in person and spend time together as a team outside of the classroom. Beyond gaining valuable technical insight, the travel experience was a great opportunity for team-bonding and left us feeling even more prepared and excited to begin developing our preliminary designs. 

Hello! We’re team 5, and over the next year we’ll be working with Duke Energy and our coach, Dr. Bean, on the fire water/service water system optimization project for Crystal River North Units 4 and 5. Our goal is to evaluate separating the fire protection water supply from the treated service water system to improve reliability on the plant side and reduce water treatment costs while keeping fire protection fully covered.

We’re now three weeks into IPPD, and things are moving. So far we’ve assembled the team and spent time getting to know each other, dug into our scope of work, met with our coach, and divided up team roles. We’ve also got a site visit to Crystal River scheduled for next week, along with our first meeting with our liaison engineers. On top of that, we settled on a team name and logo: SWAMP, which stands for System Water Allocation, Management, and Planning.

It’s been a strong start, and we’re looking forward to an exciting and productive year ahead!

Meet the team:

• Zoe Silver, ChE
• Isabel Matias Cruz, ChE
• Tomas Martinez, MSE
• Timothy Grecsek, EnvE
• Max Vu, ME
• Braden Mohr, ME