Here I describe the current radiative cooldown model for a Mariner test mass, using parameters from the most recent CAD model. A diagram of all conductive and radiative links can be seen in Attachment 1. Below are some distilled key points:
1. The source of cooling power is an infinite reservoir at 60K - realistically there will be finite cooling power and the system will be optimized within that constraint.
2. The outer shield surrounds the suspension system and some cooling power can be delivered conductively to the outer shield to hold it at an optimal temperature.
3. The suspension cage has 4 feet that insulate the cage from the table at RT.
4. The cage is composed of vertical beams and bottom and top lids. Radiative view factors from the cage to other components have been loosely estimated.
5. Suspension wires conduct heat from the cage to the upper mass, and from the upper mass to the test mass.
6. The inner shield and snout surround the test mass. Aperature openings in the inner shield (for wires) allow the test mass to radiatively "see" surroundings at ~outer shield T.
7. The snout openings and incident laser power are additional heat loads to the test mass.
All parameters have been taken from CAD, with the exception of:
1) snout length: originally 0.665m in CAD (end to end), but I doubled it to 1.33m following a discussion in group meeting
2) length of copper bar / conductive cooling pathway: set to the end-to-end length of snout. Though this is a conservative over-estimate
2) thermal conductivity of insulating feet: using 0.25 W/mK
3) radius of aperture in IS for suspension wires: using 1"
Attachment 2 contains the cooldown curves for the system components. With the above assumptions, the test mass takes ~59hrs to reach 123K, and the final steady-state temperature is 96K. (*This was edited - found a bug in previous iteration of code that underestimated the TM cooldown time constant and incorrectly concluded ~36hrs to reach 123K. The figures have been updated accordingly.)
Attachment 3-6 are power budgets for major components: TM, IS, Cage, OS (can produce for UM if there's interest). For each, the top plot shows the total heating and cooling power delivered to the component, and the bottom plot separates the heating into individual heat loads. I'll discuss these below:
- TM: The laser delivers 100mW of heating power to the test mass throughout the cooldown. The next most significant source of heating is snout - this warrants further optimization (see next ELOG).
- IS: Inevitably the test mass heats the inner shield, but the other heat loads are minimal. Note that the model does not consider radiation from the snout opening to the snout/inner shield walls, and this will be added in soon.
- Cage: The only significant heat load to the cage is conduction from the RT table through the feet. The feet can be made taller, or actively held at a colder temperature.
- OS: I've arbitrarily added conductive cooling to the OS which holds it around 175K. With the current model, adding more cooling power would only help, but in reality this will divert cooling power from going to the IS. This constraint needs to be added in before the optimal OS temperature can be determined. The most significant heat loads are from the chamber walls and the cage (see above).
The next post will describe optimization of the snout length/radius for cooldown. |