Recent progress on air-bearing slumping of segmented thin-shell mirrors for X-ray telescopes: Experiments and numerical analysis

Slumping (or thermal-shaping) of thin glass sheets onto high precision mandrels was used successfully by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to fabricate the NuSTAR telescope. But this process requires long thermal cycles and produces mid-range spatial frequency errors due to the anti-stick mandrel coatings. Over the last few years, we have designed and tested non-contact horizontal slumping of round flat glass sheets floating on thin layers of nitrogen between porous air-bearings using fast position control algorithms and precise fiber sensing techniques during short thermal cycles. We recently built a finite element model with ADiNA to simulate the viscoelastic behavior of glass during the slumping process. The model utilizes fluid-structure interaction (FSI) to understand the deformation and motion of glass under the influence of air flow. We showed that for the 2D axisymmetric model, experimental and numerical approaches have comparable results. We also investigated the impact of bearing permeability on the resulting shape of the wafers. A novel vertical slumping set-up is also under development to eliminate the undesirable influence of gravity. Progress towards generating mirrors for good angular resolution and low mid-range spatial frequency errors is reported.