Monte Carlo-based multiphysics coupling analysis of x-ray pulsar telescope

Abstract

X-ray pulsar telescope (XPT) is a complex optical payload, which involves optical, mechanical, electrical and thermal disciplines. The multiphysics coupling analysis (MCA) plays an important role in improving the in-orbit performance. However, the conventional MCA methods encounter two serious problems in dealing with the XTP. One is that both the energy and reflectivity information of X-ray can’t be taken into consideration, which always misunderstands the essence of XPT. Another is that the coupling data can’t be transferred automatically among different disciplines, leading to computational inefficiency and high design cost. Therefore, a new MCA method for XPT is proposed based on the Monte Carlo method and total reflective theory. The main idea, procedures and operational steps of the proposed method are addressed in detail. Firstly, it takes both the energy and reflectivity information of X-ray into consideration simultaneously. And formulate the thermal-structural coupling equation and multiphysics coupling analysis model based on the finite element method. Then, the thermalstructural coupling analysis under different working conditions has been implemented. Secondly, the mirror deformations are obtained using construction geometry function. Meanwhile, the polynomial function is adopted to fit the deformed mirror and meanwhile evaluate the fitting error. Thirdly, the focusing performance analysis of XPT can be evaluated by the RMS. Finally, a Wolter-I XPT is taken as an example to verify the proposed MCA method. The simulation results show that the thermal-structural coupling deformation is bigger than others, the vary law of deformation effect on the focusing performance has been obtained. The focusing performances of thermal-structural, thermal, structural deformations have degraded 30.01%, 14.35% and 7.85% respectively. The RMS of dispersion spot are 2.9143mm, 2.2038mm and 2.1311mm. As a result, the validity of the proposed method is verified through comparing the simulation results and experiments, which can be employed in the reliability-based design of XPT.