Earthquake Design and Analysis of the Extremely Large Telescope M2 Cell

Abstract

The M2 cell is the secondary mirror structure of the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). This telescope has been designed with the biggest primary focus diameter of the world and it’s going to be placed in Cerro Amazons, a remote observatory zone in Chile. Even though the optical conditions to observe the universe will be excellent, due to the geological nature of the area, the telescope can be summited to unpredictable and severe earthquake conditions. A linear FEM model of the M2 cell has been developed and a linear frequency and transient analysis have been carried out. The results are presented in this paper. However, the cell structure includes some non‐linear effects, which has proven to interfere with the results. Therefore, all of them have been individually studied and finally, some conclusions have been extracted.