Thermal Forming of Glass — Experiment vs. Simulation

Abstract

Thermal forming is a technique for forming glass foils precisely into a desired shape. It is widely used in the automotive industry. It can also be used for shaping X-ray mirror substrates for space missions, as in our case. This paper presents the initial results of methods used for automatic data processing of in-situ measurements of the thermal shaping process and a comparison of measured and simulatated values. It also briefly describes improvements of the overall experimental setup currently being made in order to obtain better and more precise results.

Keywords

• X-ray mirrors
• Comsol Multiphysics
• simulations
• thermal forming
• gravity forming
• in-situ measurements
• data processing.