Optimal Design of the Flexure Mount for Optical Mirror Using Topology Optimization Considering Thermal Stress Constraint

An optical mirror assembly is an opto-mechanically coupled system as the optical and mechanical behaviors interact. In the assembly, a flexure mount attached to an optical mirror should be flexible in the radial direction, but rigid for the remaining degrees of freedom for supporting the mirror rigidly and suppressing the wavefront error of the optical mirror. This work presents an optimal design of the flexure mount using topology optimization with thermal stress constraint. By simplifying the optical mirror assembly into finite shell elements, topology optimization model was built for efficient design and good machinability. The stress at the boundary between the optical mirror and the mount together with the first natural frequency were applied as constraints for the optimization problem, while the objective function was set to minimize the strain energy. As a result, we obtained the optimal design of the flexure mount yielding the improved wavefront error, proper rigidity, and machinability.