The multiple jet impingement heat rejecter prototype for the GREGOR Solar Telescope

Abstract

Heat rejecter (HR) is a critical component of large aperture solar telescopes. It has the double task of acting as a Field Stop, to select the solar region to be studied, and as a heat rejecter to reduce the thermal load in the subsequent optics and keep the temperature of all internal surfaces within a few degrees of the ambient temperature. This last request is necessary to avoid the onset of internal convective air plumes and the subsequent generation of internal seeing. Since the thermal flux at the primary focus of a 4-m class telescope, as the European Solar Telescope (EST), is expected to be of the order of several MW=m2, even considering high HR reflectivity, the residual thermal load is conceivably high and a suitable Cooling Systems must be considered. Among the available cooling techniques, the most promising, and already applied in critical conditions such as for nuclear fusion reactor divertor, is the Multiple Jet Impingement (MJI) techniques. To fulfill the technological challenge of the HR for the next generation 4-m class European Solar Telescope (EST), a new prototype for the 1.5 meters GREGOR solar telescope has been developed as technological proof of concept. With the aim of testing this technique, a prototype of HR was realized to be mounted at the 1.5 meters GREGOR solar telescope at the at the Teide Observatory (Canary Islands, Spain). We present the HR thermal-hydraulic design based on the expected thermal load on the GREGOR primary focal plane (≃ 1500W) and the constraints on the HR temperature. The MJI technology consists in a series of nozzles impinging the liquid coolant on the backside of the field stop hot wall. The high cooling capabilities of MJI relies on the high Reynolds numbers achievable, even with modest velocity flow. In this work we describe our efforts to design, fabricate and test the prototype of an HR to characterize the MJI technology. More in detail, we show the results of the hydraulic and thermal tests carried out in the opto-electronics laboratory of the Physics Department of the University of Rome Tor Vergata.