Short carbon fiber reinforced ceramic - Cesic - for optical-mechanical applications

Ceramic mirrors and complex structures are becoming more important for high-precision lightweighted optomechanical applications. Carbon-fiber reinforced silicon carbon (C/SiC) is a composite ceramic material consisting of SiC as its major constituent. Developments over the past 10 years by IABM, ECM, and Astrium GhbH have demonstrated the feasibility and versitility of this ceramic material for different applications. Furthermore, Cesic-a trademark of ECM for C/SiC- allows relatively quick and cheap manufacturing of components because the components can be shaped with conventional tools in a milling and/or drilling process of the greenbody material. Through a joining process and our new development of optical surfaces based on a slurry cladding technology, Cesic allows for a direct up-scaling of structures and optical surfaces to large size applications and systems. The size of the structures and mirrors that can be manufactured is limited only by the scale of the available production facilities, the largest of which currently is 2.4 m in diameter.