Cost Effective Design and Manufacture of Flexible Metallic Fine Adjustment Mechanisms for Aerospace Application using Rapid Investment Casting

Faculty Development Competitive Research Grants Program 2025-2027

Precise positioning and adjustment mechanisms are of paramount importance in many applications, including aerospace engineering. For instance, the space optical systems used for earth observation have very tight alignment requirements, and they are frequently equipped with adjustment mechanisms to achieve the desired quality of image.
The principal aim of this research is to design and develop a rapid investment casting (RIC) approach for manufacturing precision mechanisms for optical elements that operate in harsh space environments. As an example, one pair of small (<50 mm) monolithic secondary mirror adjustment mechanism will be manufactured by the RIC technique for Schmidt–Cassegrain type telescope.