MANUALLY OPERATED PRECISION ASSEMBLY MACHINE FOR BUILDING HIGH POWER LASER TARGETS

摘要

The Non-Ignition Target Assembly Machine (NITAM) was developed to manufacture high power laser targets for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) [1] and the Omega Laser Facility [2]. These targets are different from but related to the laser-driven fusion ignition targets for the National Ignition Campaign [3] that are being built with other machines developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) [4,5]. The NITAM is a partner machine to a metrology instrument that was recently developed at LLNL for inspecting targets and is presented at this conference: the Non-Ignition Target Inspection Machine (NITIM). Referred to in this paper as the assembly machine, the NITAM was originally planned as an upgrade of certain sub-systems in the legacy assembly machines being used to build the non-ignition targets. Those machines did not accommodate the larger targets that were going to be built, and the low accuracy visual-based displacement feedback used in them – scales and protractors ??– was limiting the accuracy of the completed targets. The large motion stages in the new machine have optical encoders with digital readouts to provide the needed travel range and accuracy. Two major aspects of the legacy machines were retained: how the operator interacts with it, and the architecture of the motions provided by the manipulator systems.