INVESTIGATION OF HEAD-DISK INTERFACE AND UNLOADING PROCESS IN HDD WITH AN EFFICIENT SCHEME

Abstract

An efficient scheme was developed to analyze head-disk interfaces (HDIs) in hard disk drives. HDIs were studied by decoupling the nanometer scale variations of the air bearings and the micrometer scale changes of the suspensions. The nonlinear variations of the air bearing forces and moments were described with analytical expressions obtained from a surface fitting scheme. Combined with a 3 degree of freedom (DOF) suspension model whose parameters were estimated from a comprehensive finite element model, the historical behaviors of a subambient slider during an unloading process can be obtained in a very short computation period, thus providing a way of exploring a large number of parameter values of the suspension stiffness matrix.