Lightweight cylindrical composite shell structures to support optical instruments in extremely large telescopes: A case study

Aiming at the issues of heavy weight and insufficient structural performance of optical instrument supporting structures in extremely large telescopes, the Wide-Field Optical Spectrograph (WFOS) of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) was taken as a case to study. In order to develop lightweight structures which satisfies the design requirements for mass and stiffness, a design scheme of cylindrical composite shells supporting structure was proposed and their finite element models were developed. A size optimisation and a ply sequence optimisation of the composite structure were carried out. The structures before and after optimisation were evaluated from the aspects of mass, displacement, failure index and fundamental frequency. After the optimised design, the mass of the optimised WFOS cylindrical composite shell structure is reduced to approximately 50%, but its maximum displacement (0.513 mm) and fundamental frequency (8.275 Hz) are nearly unchanged. The study indicates that a cylindrical composite shell structure is an efficient structural form for large optical instruments.