Modeling and control of massively actuated, magnetically levitated, adaptive mirrors

The successful design of non contact, magnetically levitated, massively actuated deformable mirrors and their control system requires the use of medium to high fidelity hybrid multidisciplinary simulation models, encompassing: deformable structures, fluid dynamics of the air film interposed between the mirror and its reference backplane, sensor and actuator dynamics, the control system. Such models must serve the diverse needs for the analysis, design and verification of a fully decentralized control solution and to simulate all of on the field operational phases including initial feedback design, the identification of the static feed-forward matrix and control self tuning. The paper presents the related modeling techniques along with a few results and experimental correlations validating various aspects of the presented capabilities.