Design and Thermal Analysis of a Composite Mirror Structure

摘要

The surrogate mirrors for the DOT (Deployable Optical Telescope) testbed were designed for structural stiffness, lightweight, and minimal thermal distortion. The primary structure consisted of a tripod made with pultruded composite rods connected to invar blocks, which carried the glass reflectors. A finite element model of the mirror was developed to study the tradeoffs in using different materials. Pultruded rods were produced at site and the Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE) of the pultruded rods was measured with laser interferometry.