Design Individual Chamber

There are many ways to make the honeycomb structure, in order to make it easy we will introduce it here step-by-step.

The general overview of steps entails first creating a fragment of one chamber, and complete it using symmetry operations. After that, the whole manipulator can be achieved by replication based on one chamber and patterning to achieve the network.

First step, launch Solidworks and create a new Part.

new_part

Next, select a datum plane and begin to sketch.

Next, we draw the sketch of a single honeycomb chamber. Because the chamber is a symmetrical hexagon, we only draw its quarter and then mirror it twice (using the Mirror Entities operator).

Now it's the sketch of one quarter of the hexagon shown below.

sketch_begin

Mirror it for the first time, and we get the upper half of the hexagon.

mirror1

Mirror again, and we get the whole hexagon.

mirror2

Then, we use the Offset Entities operator, with the distance of 2 mm, to get the chamber with desired thickness.

offset