The Daedalus Domes

Hi, my name is Angus Beckett, a recently graduated student from Allegan, MI. I am a military brat with an affinity for 3d printing. I participated in the REC aerial drone competition, as well as maintained and helped start a makerspace in my High school. This is my entry to the Make It Home contest.

These are the Daedalus domes, a modular housing solution that turns plastic waste into durable, useful homes.

These are designed to provide durable, permanent shelter to Seattle, OR, a community struggling with a homeless crisis. The coastal beaches and the city of Seattle also produce lots of plastic waste. So, why not solve both?

These are not made up of cubes or rectangular prisms. Why is this a good thing?

A. Full Printability

Having a dome allows any 3d printer to be able to be able to construct a Daedalus dome.

Most concrete 3d printers cannot print standard houses in full, with a roof requiring many overhangs. A dome allows the entire room to be printed in one single piece.

B. Heat capture

Domes are excellent at capturing heat and keeping the temperature regulated. This makes domes like this prime candidate for extreme climates, as well as being more energy efficient than a conventional box or rectangular prism.

C. Durability

A dome shape helps distribute load to the entire structure, keeping the structure as strong as possible (though real strength would be based on the construction material). This is key for long-term use, and while the Domes could be used for temporary housing, there should never be a worry that they will fall apart.

D. Weather resistance

The top window will allow heat to escape out of the top if opened, providing a cooling effect on hot days, and dome shapes are naturally known to be energy efficient at warming rooms.

In addition to this, the dome is perfectly shaped to shed rain as quickly as possible, and the platforms allow channels of water to flow between them.

Why should these exist? To kill two birds with one stone dome.

Just one dome and base would remove 12,000 cubic feet of plastic from a landfill or the ocean if printed 100% solid.

That is ROUGHLY 240 tons of plastic. Your soda/pop bottle, your milk jug, your disposable water bottle, etc, suddenly has a very good use.

That durable home could comfortably house 4 if sectioned correctly. The weight, combined with the hinges and anchoring platforms, will make sure the house stays put for as long as possible.

There are 3 main ways to cluster the domes.

1. The big cluster, which I will use as the example for plumbing and electrical, could theoretically house anywhere from 30-120 people (depending on how rooms are configured) and is my personal favorite.
2. The "homestead" is a 5-dome, 2-platform configuration that would be perfect for a homestead, rural housing, or any application where only a few people are needed.
3. The Domes could also be just used by themselves to suit any extra need that might arise.

Supplies needed to make this a reality

1 (or 5) 30'x30' 3d printers printing recycled and dried PET plastic or concrete

(This is an entire other feat of engineering that is completely plausible, but is reserved for large companies and universities with the right machine and budget for the time being.)

A source of plastic from one of the many organizations cleaning up the Earth

Funding for paying people and other miscellaneous costs

A need for housing, and people ready to accept it.

Supplies needed to make this scale model

1 roll of PETG filament

1 super epic 3d printer

Paint of your choice

some 22 gauge wire

The files below

Hexagons are the Bestagons -CGP Grey.

Hexagons, plus an alternating axle system, make up the bases. A simple, and hopefully elegant, place to build from.

Then the domes, for the reasons mentioned in the introduction, are revolved and detail is added.

Then, after far too much overthinking, windows with rounded corners were put in.

I also added some faux vine indents in the dome that could act as wire routes in the future, but mostly serve as a way to add detail and break up the big, plain parts of the design.

Quite a few of the reasons for design choices in this project are anchored in environmental psychology, the study of the interactions between humans and their environment. Lily Bernhimer, author of The Shaping of Us, describes an acronym for making a place good for humans to live. (pictured above). That book, borrowed from the Internet Archive, gave me an entirely new perspective on designing living spaces and made me think about where I lived. Things like that, ten-foot ceilings can make even a small room feel less cramped, and we instinctively want our bedrooms to feel smaller and safer than any room in a house.

The dome also allows for curves while keeping temperature balanced and makes it possible to 3d print in one piece. The embossed designs allow for visual complexity while keeping construction simple. The square windows allow plants to be more easily placed near sunlight. As you will see, the design is good for efficiency, easy to heat and cool, designed for easy off-grid use, and modular.

My first draft of the domes had a square base, but then I realized hexagons had more possibilities for expansions. The first design had no electrical or water systems included; it was mostly just a sounding board to figure out what design ended up working best.

First, I revolved a curve around a center point to create the initial dome part. I found this was the simplest way to design the dome, as opposed to lofting two points. This allows more control over the angle and thickness of the dome, and makes it easy to revise the design.

The first base was a crude square with some basic hinges. This would allow the domes to be arranged in grids, which, in hindsight, makes some sense, but I liked the further modularity of hexagons for the second design.

Now that I had the rough design figured out, I was able to begin a final design. Things got complicated quick.

In short(ish) Here are all of the things included in the final design.

1. two floors
2. a basic bedroom/kitchen layout
3. water routing holes
4. electrical routing
5. Model split into two part IF two floors are needed
6. hexagon base
7. rounded hinges
8. holes for ground anchors or floats in special bases
9. Windows
10. discreet vent holes
11. animations for the hinges to make sure they worked

This is not perfect. I wish it were, but it is certainly enough design to hopefully get the point across to you.

Each dome contains a 48V DC battery that is connected in parallel to identical domes and also connected to an inverter to convert into standard 120V AC "wall power" to power appliances, electronics, etc. While AC power is safer to transfer, it is a big loss of efficiency to have to charge each of the batteries with other batteries.

The battery is to ensure redundancy and allow power to be as simple, while still being as modular as possible.

For example, if a tornado comes through and damages 7 housing domes, the remaining 8 in a cluster would still be able to function at full capacity without any sort of power outage. All of the wires going between domes would have fuses to prevent an electrical catastrophe.

Power would hopefully be provided by off-grid sources of electricity based on the area. (solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, etc.)

Plumbing is a realm I am not familiar with in the least, but it is very much needed. There are three ways to go about this:

A. Full Blackwater/Freshwater off-grid

The domes are too compact to hold a water heater and operate efficiently, so one dome in a cluster would have to serve as a desalination/ water heating station. This is less redundant, yes, but an entire enclosed water heating system in each would take up far too much space. lines for each would all return to wherever the station would be placed. See the above diagram for one possible solution.

B. Compost toilet and freshwater tank

This is the simplest solution, and is by far the cheapest. A compost toilet can keep the smell down and is portable, but needs often maintenance. The potable water tank could wash dishes, provide freshwater, and give (limited) water to wash in.

C. City water

If the domes are constructed or placed in an area where residential water can be put, that is an easy solution. Residential standards might take up a little more space than a compost toilet, but are familiar to plumbers and would be a good standardized solution.

The 3 main things that make up temperature control:

1. Heating and cooling: With semi-recent advancements in HVAC, most of the heating/cooling for individual domes can be done with mini-splits, small heat pumps that are fairly energy efficient and effective.
2. Insulation: Because of the dome design, the structure will inherently regulate temperature (see here for details). If for some reason insulation is needed, the print can be designed to have air gaps to act as insulation, either as insulation or by increasing the moisture content in the material.
3. Airflow: The dome allows for convection-style air circulation, but the windows were purposely placed on both floors as well as the apex to allow fresh air in if needed.

I am not experienced in making miniatures or very artistic, so I decided to simply 3D print the design as it would be printed in a larger scale. The parts were printed in black and orange, brims were taken off, then the domes were spray-painted blue to keep the design one color. The models aim to make a real-world representation of what the real thing might look like. Once they were assembled, I made a mock solar grid to represent a possible power solution for my area.

This one's pretty easy. Fusion makes it simple enough to just hide the models you do not want, paint on a plethora of colors, and hit render. If you have a beefy enough computer, you can render locally, or just have Fusion do the rendering in the cloud. I rendered quite a few images, but ended up choosing a "street" view, a top view, and a side view for the big cluster. The design of the rest is very simple, and there are only so many ways to look at it. i went with a top view, 3/4 view and front view to fully visualize the designs.

As I said before, this is nowhere near "finished" or "incredible" or "Superfragilisticexpealidocius"

I have only learned to use Fusion 360 for about a year and a half now, and most definitely have lots to learn. I am self-taught, learning mostly by 3d printing and projects like this. As a result, some things need fixing if the design is to ever go anywhere.

1. Optimization for concrete 3d printing: one of the less realistic parts of the design is that it is designed for a (very) large FDM Machine, which is totally possible, but making the design able to be concrete 3d printed would allow for a more real-world implementation of this design.
2. Better renderings and more detailed models: the design needs to be further optimized, and my knowledge of super detailed models is not there. A better rendering would also take the model from an engineering idea to a full-scale possibility.
3. Scaling: I have the rough scale of the Domes figured out (heights, room sizes, etc), but the drawing is currently scaled at whatever is convenient for 3d printing on my 3d printer (IE, millimeters).
4. Hinges: The hinges are currently integrated into the design, and there needs to be a hinge-less version, as well as a standardized solution for a real prototype.
5. Make them float: I originally wanted to pitch these as floating, to save land, but I quickly realized the can of worms that came with designing essentially a houseboat that would be anchored to a coast.
6. interior detail: I am not so great at interior 3d design, so having some more interior choices would be great.
7. Parametric: One of the original pipe dreams for the project was to make the domes parametric, to allow for more customization between houses. The clusters are still a bit boring, being all the same dome for the time being.

I see you have made it to the end. (or just scrolled to the end, I see you) You say: This is not a quadrilateral; there are few, if any, right angles, and the whole thing is supposed to be 3d printed? That is ridiculous. Maybe, but it is Plausible. Even though the design is a little crazy and a little unfinished, it is Plausible. With the right machine and the right source of plastic, these could completely become a reality. It has been engineered to be the best I can show it as.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks to my family, who have supported this medium-sized undertaking,

All of my friends who offered suggestions and criticism,

And Thanks be to God, who made it all happen.