Development of an analytical mirror model addressing the problem of thermoelastic deformation

Abstract

The computation of the thermoelastic deformation within convectively cooled high-power laser beam control components is typically done with large general purpose finite element or finite difference algorithms. These programs are not generally cost-effective or informative about the influence of the relevant physics. The classical analytical description of thermoelastic deformation illuminates the nature of the physical processes involved and leads to a boundary value problem that is very difficult to solve. It will be shown that use of specific information about the nonsimple connectedness of convectively cooled optics constrains the form of the governing partial differential equation to yield rather simple representations, expressible in terms of tractable analytic solutions or numerical schemes.