Opti­miza­tion of Airborne Optical Sensor

In a recent work, we opti­mized an airborne optical sensor, which is typ­i­cally built into an impres­sive device for sensing data remotely, e.g. from heli­copters. The mirror blanks for the optical sensor are made from glass ceramics with an extremely low thermal expan­sion and dynamic oper­a­tion behavior, in which geo­met­ri­cal shape and dis­place­ment must be kept within very small limits under working con­di­tions. Moreover, for this specific airborne appli­ca­tion, the weight of the mirror blank needed to be min­i­mized. Both require­ments – the minimum defor­ma­tion during oper­a­tion and the low weight – dominate the design of the product. 

Automa­tion of the Airborne Optical Sensor Design Process

The aim of this study was to provide a fully para­met­ric model of the mirror blank’s shape in CAESES®, analyze and optimize the model within ANSYS Work­bench using a coupled con­nec­tion between the two software packages. The para­met­ric model defined in CAESES was made avail­able to the Work­bench through the CAESES ACT App, and linked to Modal and Static Struc­tural systems. The results of the opti­miza­tion process are pre­sented such that they can be used as an aid to select­ing the most favor­able design for the envi­sioned mirror blank appli­ca­tion. The fol­low­ing image shows a com­par­i­son of the baseline design and the opti­mized one:

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This inter­est­ing study was pre­sented at the CADFEM ANSYS Sim­u­la­tion Con­fer­ence 2017. Download the full paper ​“Uti­liz­ing CAESES’ Para­met­ric CAD Engine in ANSYS’ Work­bench”, which includes a more detailed summary of this work. 

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