Active thermal control for the 1.8-m primary mirror of the solar telescope CLST

摘要

The 1.8-m primary mirror of solar telescope is heated by the solar radiation and introduce harmful mirror seeing degrading the imaging quality. For the Chinese Large Solar Telescope (CLST), the thermal requirement based on the quantitative evaluation on mirror seeing effect shows that the temperature rise on mirror surface should be within 1 kelvin. To meet the requirement, an active thermal control system design for the CLST primary mirror is proposed, and realized on the subscale prototype of the CLST. The experimental results show that the temperature on the mirror surface is well controlled. The average and maximum thermal controlled error are less than 0.3 and 0.7 kelvins respectively, which completely meets the requirements.