This thesis is written to advance the readerÕs knowledge of precision-engineering principles and their application to designing machines that achieve both sufficient precision and minimum cost. It provides the concepts and tools necessary for the engineer to create new precision machine designs. Four case studies demonstrate the principles and showcase approaches and solutions to specific problems that generally have wider applications. These come from projects at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in which the author participated: the Large Optics Diamond Turning Machine, Accuracy Enhancement of High-Productivity Machine Tools, the National Ignition Facility, and Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography. Although broad in scope, the topics go into sufficient depth to be useful to practicing precision engineers and often fulfill more academic ambitions.Many people contributed to this thesis in a variety of different ways, and I would like to thank and acknowledge these people for their knowledge, their ideas and their efforts. The thesis committee consisted of Professors Alexander Slocum, Carl Peterson and John Lienhard V all of MIT and Dr. Robert Donaldson who was my supervisor at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) from 1990 to 1993. If I please only one person with this thesis, I hope Bob Donaldson is that person. I thank Alex Slocum for motivating me to begin a doctoral program and for being a role model for professional achievement. My thesis committee has been unduly patient and tolerant of probably too few interactions drawn out over too long of a time. Their suggestions helped make this thesis better for you, the reader, for which I am very grateful. Leslie Regan and the staff at the ME Graduate Office helped me many times during my enrollment at MIT; thank you for being so good.My thanks go to two well-known figures in Precision Engineering, Tyler Estler from NIST and James Bryan formally from LLNL, who provided many valuable comments on an early draft. They did so out of dedication to the field.A number of my colleagues reviewed specific sections and/or collaborated on the projects used as case studies in the thesis. Debra Krulewich reviewed sections on error budgets, separation techniques, transformation matrices and least-squares fitting. Todd Decker reviewed the introduction to exact-constraint design. Eric Marsh reviewed the chapter on damping. Rick Montesanti reviewed the chapter on practical exact-constraint design. Terry Malsbury reviewed the EUVL examples of exact-constraint design. Jeff Klingmann reviewed the chapter on the conceptual design of a horizontal machining center.
We describe the fabrication of the two NuSTAR flight optics modules. The NuSTAR optics modules are glass-graphiteepoxy composite structures to be employed for the first time in space-based X-ray optics by NuSTAR, a NASA Small Explorer schedule for launch in February 2012. We discuss the optics manufacturing process, the qualification and environmental testing performed, and briefly discuss the results of X-ray performance testing of the two modules. The integration and alignment of the completed flight optics modules into the NuSTAR instrument is described as are the optics module thermal shields. OVERVIEW OF THE OPTICS MODULESThe Nuclear Spectroscopy Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is a NASA Small Explorer (SMEX) satellite mission scheduled for launch in February 2012. The NuSTAR experiment contains two telescopes each consisting of an optic and a CdZnTe focal plane detector separated from each other by a 10-meter deployable mast (figure 1). The experiment is an extension and improvement on the design successfully employed in the HEFT balloon experiment (Harrison et al. 2005 1 ). NuSTAR will operate in the 6-79 keV energy band. More details on the mission, the overall instrument design and performance requirements and scientific objectives can be found in Harrison et al. 2010 2 .A blowup of an individual optics module is also shown in figure 1. Each layer of the optic has an upper and lower conic shell (equivalent to the parabola-hyperbola sections of a Wolter-I optic). Each shell is composed of multiple thermally formed glass segments. Each piece of glass is coated with a depth-graded multilayer. The enhanced reflectivity provided by the multilayers, along with the shallow graze angles afforded by the focal length of the optics (10.15 meter) provide high effective area over the NuSTAR energy band of 6-79 keV, and a field of view of 12 arcminutes by 12 arcminutes. There are 133 concentric layers which together form each optic. The glass layers (a glass-epoxy-graphite composite structure) are built up on a Titanium mandrel. Titanium support spiders located on the top and bottom of each optic connect it to the optical bench. The compliant, radially-symmetric spiders accommodate thermal expansion effects as well as dynamic loading. Thin x-ray transparent thermal covers on the entrance and exit apertures of the optic reduce thermal gradients by blocking direct view of the sun and deep space. Two flight modules, FM1 and FM2, were fabricated. A third module, FM0, was fabricated earlier and has Pt/SiC multilayers on the inner 89 layers. FM0 is a potential flight spare and is available to provide for more extensive X-ray characterization than is permitted for either of the flight modules, given the compressed delivery schedule of the optics.
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