Thermo-mechanical properties of a deformable mirror with screen printed actuator

This paper reports on the thermo-mechanical modeling and characterization of a screen printed deformable mirror. The unimorph mirror offers a ceramic LTCC substrate with screen printed PZT layers on its rear surface and a machined copper layer on its front surface. We present the thermo-mechanical model of the deformable mirror based on Ansys multiphysics. The developed mirror design is practically characterized. The homogeneous loading of the optimized design results in a membrane deformation with a rate of -0.2 μm/K, while a laser loading causes a change with a rate of 1.3 μm/W. The proposed mirror design is also suitable to pre-compensate laser generated mirror deformations by homogeneous thermal loading (heating). We experimentally show that a 35 K pre-heating of the mirror assembly could compensate an absorbed laser power of 1.25 W.