Adjoint Design Sensitivity Analysis of Molecular Gas Film Lubrication Sliders

Abstract

This paper proposes an analytical design sensitivity analysis (DSA) to topological parameters of MGL (molecular gas film lubrication) sliders by introducing an adjoint variable method. For the analysis of slider air bearings, we used the spatial discretization of the generalized lubrication equation based on a control volume formulation. The residual functions for inverse analysis of the slider are considered as the equality constraint functions. The slider rail heights of all grid cells are chosen as design variables since they are the topological parameters determining air bearing surface (ABS). Then, a complicated adjoint variable equation is formulated to directly handle the highly nonlinear asymmetric coefficient matrix and vector in the discrete system equations of slider air bearings. An alternating direction implicit (ADI) scheme is utilized to efficiently solve large-scale problem in special band storage. The simulation results of DSA are directly compared with those of finite-difference approximation (FDA) to show the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed approach. The overall sensitivity distribution over the ABS is reported, and clearly shows to which section of the ABS the special attention should be given during the manufacturing process. It is demonstrated that the proposed method can reduce more than 99 percent of the CPU time in comparison with FDA, even though both methods give the same results.