Mechanical engineer. Powertrain, ECUs, CubeSat deployment. Asking spacecraft inconvenient questions.
BTech Mechanical Engineering, Symbiosis Institute of Technology, Pune · 2023–2027
In 2021 I got stuck on a dumb question: why do we still deploy CubeSats with springs. I never really got unstuck. That question is now VOLLEY: an electromagnetic deployer that ejects unmodified 3U CubeSats at a programmable velocity, 6.6 times the fastest published spring comparator, from a spent rideshare upper stage. I've presented it at DRDO ARDE and the India Science Festival.
Before that there was rocketry, where our payload took 2nd globally at the SDL Payload Challenge, IREC 2025 in Texas. Alongside it there are engines, I run Poona Motor Club, tune Royal Enfield, KTM and Honda platforms, and when Powertronic's map files turned out to be an obfuscated binary I reverse-engineered the format and built a dual-map editor so I could stop guessing. This year I'm on powertrain for our Formula Student team.
Aerospace, telecom software, engines. I have a hunch they all come from the same place. Haven't proven it yet.
VOLLEY, a magazine-fed ironless double-sided Halbach linear synchronous motor that ejects unmodified CubeSats at 16.388 m/s and 10.533 g, drawing 2.85 kJ gross and 2.56 kJ net per shot. TRL 2–3. Nothing built, fired or measured.
Open it for the defect record, not the numbers. Every error I've found in my own work is published and numbered, including the ones that damage the claims. An independent propagator falsified a claim in my paper's own abstract; that's logged as P16 rather than quietly dropped. The pulse-power chain does not close on a commercially realistic single supercapacitor string. A covariance claim, an internal-momentum conclusion and the brake-fin thermal model have all been superseded in public. Acceptance bands are written down before each analysis runs, so a failure cannot be rationalised afterwards.
That habit is the actual portfolio: skills, with the file that proves each one
| 🛰 VOLLEY | The authoritative engineering record. Start at SUMMARY.md |
| 📄 VOLLEY-paper | IEEE manuscript and reproducibility package |
| 🎓 VOLLEY-thesis | Final-year submission |
| 🧪 VOLLEY-lab | Phase II work. Deliberately unstable and not citable |
I pulled out the parts that still make sense without the spacecraft around them. Each repository keeps its VOLLEY source commit and file hashes, and each keeps the failed or void evidence beside the useful result.
| Repository | What it does | Boundary |
|---|---|---|
| Pulsed Linear Motor Design Lab | Screens force, stroke, moving mass, source impedance and energy | Constant-force model; no hardware validation |
| Engineering Evidence Toolkit | Checks finite results, local links, source presence and artifact hashes | Consistency is not physics validation |
| Orbital Deployment Trade Study | Screens tangential impulses, phase drift, recoil and internal-mass disturbance | Two-body and rigid-body only; not conjunction assessment |
Simulation: scikit-fem, gmsh, GetDP, CalculiX, ngspice, GMAT, magpylib. I wrote a 2-D magnetostatic FEM from the weak form to check my own thrust constant; it agrees to 0.03% at the corrected operating point, the first time that number rested on a PDE solve instead of another superposition model.
CAD/CAE: Fusion 360, SolidWorks, AutoCAD, ANSYS. Three CAD generations of the deployer, all in the repository as STEP.
Engines: combustion airflow, head porting, camshaft profiling, ECU calibration. 46 to ~60 bhp on an RE Super Meteor 650, dyno-validated across the band.
Code: Python for numerics, traceability tools and engineering automation; MATLAB and C where the problem needs them. At work I own systems architecture and product design for a telecom CRM platform, which is not what I was hired to do.
Hindi and English native · Marathi, Maithili · Russian, French elementary. Friends call me AVM, pronounced how it's spelled, Aevium. Recognised by the ISRO Chairman for aerospace STEM outreach; member, Space Generation Advisory Council.
📫 adityavardhanmishr@gmail.com · LinkedIn · Pune, India