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The lateral flow in hard disk drives is greatly disturbed because of the arm swinging rapidly during track seeking, which can greatly affect off-track residual vibrations during track following of the head-gimbal assembly (HGA), as well as the slider. Until now, no simulation studies have been performed to investigate off-track residual vibrations of the HGA that consider lateral flow effects. In this paper, the effect of track-seeking on off-track residual vibrations of the HGA is investigated for air and helium environments using the so-called “fluid dynamic mesh” and the “fluid-structure interaction” methods for the first time. Three different angular acceleration profiles (a square wave, a triangular wave, and a sinusoidal wave) are investigated as a function of seek time (10 and 5 ms). Results show that the smoothening of sharp transitions in the seek profile improves the performance of off-track residual vibrations and shortens the track-following time of the head positioning servo system. In addition, the effect of lateral flow (windage) on off-track residual vibrations must be considered for a square-wave angular acceleration profile. Simulation results show that helium improves the track-following accuracy compared to air because of the lower windage forces acting on the HGA. We observe that the sinusoidal-wave angular acceleration performs best for the three angular acceleration profiles investigated. Furthermore, seek time is found to have only a small effect on off-track residual vibrations during track following. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Currently, heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology has been proposed as a method for enabling higher storage density. In this paper, the molecular dynamic simulation method was used to investigate the consumption and recovery of the lubricant perfluoropolyether (PFPE) layer under rapid heating and cooling through HAMR. A full-atom model for the 3-D slider-lubricants-disk substrate system was built for this paper. The lubricant adheres to the diamond-like carbon substrate, and the space between the slider and the lubricant is filled with helium atoms. It is found that HAMR laser heating results in the gradual consumption of the PFPE lubricant, and that the target operational temperature T0 significantly affects the consumption of the PFPE lubricant on the disk substrate. The extent of lubricant consumption increases sharply when T0 is above 600 K. The lubricant’s weight percentage on the disk substrate rises up again when cooling occurs. But it cannot be completely recovered. On the other hand, the bearing pressure reduces the degree of consumption of the PFPE lubricant by laser heating. However, the effect of bearing pressure on the amount of remaining PFPE lubricant becomes weak when T0 is above 800 K. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lubricant bridge connecting the slider and the disk will significantly deteriorate the read–write stability of the hard disk drive. This paper builds a model of disk-lubricant-slider system. The coarse-grained bead-spring model is used to represent perfluoropolyethers molecules. And the molecular dynamic method is used to study the formation time and the molecule number of the lubricant bridge under different disk rotation speeds and slider flying heights. Furthermore, the influence of lubricant bridge on the pressure acting on the slider pad is also studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous works investigated particle trajectories in hard disk drives (HDDs) with the actuator arm and the head gimbals assembly at a fixed position. Actually, internal fluid field characteristics of HDDs can be greatly changed by the arm swing during track-seeking operations, which can affect particle trajectories and trapping status. In this paper, using the dynamic mesh method in a 2.5 in HDD for the first time considers the arm swing in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. Al2O3 particle trajectories in this HDD are studied by the CFD solver FLUENT with user-defined functions. The trapping criterion for Al2O3 particles is used as a boundary condition for colliding surfaces. Simulation results reveal that the particle undergoes a larger number of collisions with the disk surface for the average seek time of 12 ms than for the average seek time of 6 ms. In addition, the faster the arm swings, the larger the number of particles that gather near the arm, and the shorter time it will take for particles to be trapped. Moreover, particle-surface collisions can successively take place many times in the helium flow. Furthermore, the particles are trapped slower in the helium-filled drive than in the air-filled drive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reliability and stability of hard disk drives (HDDs) are especially important as the areal recording density is rapidly increasing and target to 10 Tb/in2 in the future. The vibrations of the head gimbals assembly (HGA) are inevitable by internal fluid flow and external shock impulses. In this paper, a 3-D finite-element model of an HDD is developed. The internal flow-induced HGA vibrations are investigated by a fluid–structure interaction approach. The external shock-induced vibrations of HGA are also analyzed. The investigated filling gases in the HDD include air and helium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, hard disk drive filling with helium has emerged to achieve highly stable magnetic recording. The bearing force in helium is different from that in air. This paper uses the 3-D direct simulation Monte Carlo method to investigate the bearing force over bit-patterned media in the filling gases of air and helium under different conditions, including groove depth, ambient temperature, slider surface temperature, rotation speed of the disk, and different velocity losses during the collision process between the gas molecules and the slider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]