An Optimum Design of the Transverse Pressure Contour Slider for Enhanced Flying Characteristics

Abstract

This paper proposes a design method for determining the configuration of a TPC slider by using an optimization technique in order to meet the desired flying characteristics over the entire recording band. The desired flying characteristics considered in this study are to minimize the variation in flying height from a target value, to maintain the pitch angle as large as possible, to keep the roll angle as small as possible, and to keep the outside rail to fly lower than the inside rail. The design variables selected are left-side step width, pad width, right-side step width, side step depth, front taper height, and pivot offset in the transverse direction of the slider. The sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method in Automated Design Synthesis (ADS) is used to efficiently find the optimum design variables which simultaneously meet all the desired flying characteristics. To validate the suggested design method, a computer program is developed and applied to the configuration design of two TPC slider models positioned by a rotary actuator. The optimum configurations of each slider model are automatically obtained for three different target flying heights with the same predefined skew angle range without any difficulty. This shows the effectiveness of the proposed design method in comparison with the conventional one based on the parametric study.