Daniel Massimino

Research Projects • Other Projects • Photography • Email

Hello! I’m Daniel, a PhD student at MIT in Mechanical Engineering. I am currently working in the Fabrication Integrated Design Lab (FIDL). I am investigating using glass additive manufacturing as a building material in partnership with Evenline Inc.

I am broadly interested in the development of new construction materials. This interest stems from the combination of my BS in Civil Engineering from Columbia University, five years as a Boeing manufacturing engineer at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility, and my current studies as a mechanical engineer.

Other Projects

Moon BRICCS

2024 • Class Project

I was part of the inaugural Space Architecture Studio at MIT, led by Professors Jeffrey Hoffman, Nicholas De Monchaux, Dava Newman, and Skylar Tibbits. Our team’s concept utilized molten regolith casting to produce individual masonry units. These units were combined to build large corbelled shell structures, inspired by Mycenaean tombs in Greece, for radiation shielding. Hence the name Moon BRICCS (Moon Blocks Using Regolith ISRU for Corbelled Construction of Sustainable Shielding). We built two demonstrations: an underwater assembly and a robotic assembly of the units shown in the videos to the right.

Render of lunar colony using corbelled structures.

Another view of proposed lunar colony.

Render of single habitation radiation protection. Inflatable space would be inside this structure.

Cast glass model of invdividual masonry unit.

Contributions:
Background research, manufacturing process and structural concept development. Energy calculations, scale glass model casting.

Team:
Mikita Klimenka, Lanie McKinney, Palak Patel, Juan Salazar, Annika Thomas

Advisors:
Cody Paige, Jeffrey Hoffman, George Lordos, Nicholas De Monchaux, Dava Newman, Skylar Tibbits

Rotary table bearing constraint redesign

2024 • Class Project

As part of Professor Alex Slocum’s 2.70 class (FUNdaMENTALS of Machine Design), I investigated a stiffness issue in Evenline’s Glass 3D Printer III (G3DP3). The column affixed to the build plate had experienced significant degradation in stiffness, primarily due to a failure in the rotary stage. As part of the work, I disassembled the stage and identified the culprit: the outer races of the bearings were constrained by screws. I designed a new constraint, machined the existing rotary table platen, shimmed all components, and reassembled the system.

Redesigned bearing constraint shown with 8-bolt hole pattern.

Assembled rotary stage after installing new rotary bearing constraints.

The culprit of the problems! These screws were directly pressing on the outer races of the bearings and were bent over time.

Milling a slot into the existing rotary table top to add clearance for the new constraint.

FEA of the new rotary bearing constraint system. Checking to see if there will be any local failure with the high torques on the center shaft.

Contributions:
Design, microscopy, Structural FEA, machining, overall analysis

Advisors:
Kaitlyn Becker, Alex Slocum

Final presentation: link
Final report: link

Desktop Lathe

2023 • Class project

Class project for 2.72, Elements of Machine Design. As a team, we designed and built a desktop lathe with a hot-swappable tool post. Different tool posts for different materials were mounted on a kinematic coupling that could be removed and re-indexed. The machine was accurate to 0.01” and repeatable to 0.002”.

View of the assembled lathe.

Top down view of the flexure x-drive system for our lathe. Also shown is our tool changer system with separate steel and aluminum tools.

Close up view of the lathe.

Contributions:
FEA structural analysis on the flexure cross-slide. Machining some components. Accuracy and repeatability measurements of final performance.

Team:
Cat Arase, Quang Kieu, Levi Gershon, Aditya Mehrotra, Qifan Yu

Final report: link

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