PITT SOAR

As Mechanical Team Lead, I balanced both technical leadership and schedule management for a 20-member sub-team, mentoring engineers, delegating tasks, and ensuring milestone adherence throughout the design and build cycle. My responsibilities spanned the launch vehicle’s structural design, stage-separation mechanisms, aerodynamic optimization, and more. Overseeing every mechanical subsystem from concept through testing. To explore our detailed work, click below.

As part of my broad responsibilities on SOAR, I collaborated with the propulsion team to formulate, characterize, and static-fire our unique hybrid propellant. Using both subscale and full-scale test stands, we captured detailed thrust curves, performed chamber-pressure measurements, and iterated on nozzle geometry to optimize specific impulse and burn efficiency. My contributions included precise propellant mixing, test stand construction, instrumentation setup, data-acquisition scripting for real-time analysis, and post-test performance modeling. This ensures that each static fire delivered the performance and reliability targets required for flight.

I led the design and implementation of an active control-surface airbrake system for our rockets, beginning with a Simulink model that captured the vehicle’s aerodynamic behavior and brake-deflection dynamics. From that model, I collaborated with our avionics team to implement the intended controls into our custom PCB's. This utilizes IMU's and Barometric Pressure data in order to derive altitude, acceleration, and velocity. To learn more about the design click below.

I designed, built, and flew a Level 1 TRA rocket to about 2,000 ft on an H-class motor, overseeing airframe construction, fin alignment, dual-deploy electronics setup, and pre-flight testing to ensure a stable ascent, clean separation, and safe recovery. 

I further fueled my rocketry passion by independently designing, building, and flying a Level 2 TRA certification flight. I handcrafted the custom airframe from lightweight composite tubing and precision-machined fin can assemblies, then soldered every electronic component. This was achieved from the ground-station interface and GPS breakout board to the dual-redundant flight computers. The avionics suite streamed live telemetry (altitude, GPS position, and attitude) back to the control station while simultaneously logging to the backup flight computer. Pre-flight validation included vibration testing of the electronics bay, RF link-range checks, and static ignitor trials. Propelled by a J-class motor, the rocket ascended to approximately 4,000 ft, executed a flawless apogee cutoff and dual-deploy recovery sequence, and safely returned for post-flight data analysis. This project honed my skills in composite fabrication, embedded systems, RF communications, and flight-data processing.