Numerical Investigation of Airflow Pattern inside Environmental Chamber

Abstract

In industrial hard disk drive research and development laboratories, an environmental chamber is normally used to perform a mechanical verification test of Head Gimbal Assembly (HGA). It is very important to verify that the airflow pattern in the chamber is comparable to that in a real hard disk drive. Hence, we applied a transition shear stress transportation turbulence model (transition SST), one of the robust mathematical models in computer fluid dynamics, to simulate the airflow behavior inside both an environmental chamber and a hard disk drive (HDD). We found that, overall, the two patterns of airflow were not comparable at all. The air velocity vectors around the HGA in VENA were smaller than that in HDD. The reason for this is likely to be that there was more space between the top cover of the chamber and the platter than the space between the top cover of the hard disk drive and its platter.