Manufacturing and testing large SiC mirrors in an efficient way

Abstract

SiC mirrors are of excellent mechanical and thermal properties compared to their glass opponents. Efficient fabrication and testing of SiC mirrors, particularly the large freeform surfaces are very challenging. In this paper, direct CNC generation, deterministic polishing techniques including CCOS, MRF, and IBF were addressed in detail. Since testing is critical to make high accuracy freeform surfaces, the paper focused on Computer Generated Hologram (CGH) design and implement to measure large mirrors. In particular, detector to mirror mapping distortion was discussed in detail. Finally, some results for SiC mirrors were presented.