Numerical study on the effects of linear protrusion on flow-induced carriage excitation force in hard disk drives

The positioning accuracy of magnetic heads needs to be improved to increase the recording capacity of hard disk drives. In our previous study, experimental results confirmed that the head-positioning error could be decreased by attaching linear protrusions on the leading edge of the carriage arms. However, the mechanism underlying the phenomenon has not been elucidated. In the present research, we evaluated the effect of leading-edge protrusions on the flow-induced carriage excitation force using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis and the Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT). We prepared two carriage-arm models, with and without linear protrusions, on the leading edges of the arm, and performed the CFD analyses. Subsequently, we conducted a frequency analysis by applying HHT to the simulated disturbance torque time-series of each carriage-arm model and compared the results. Our results show that the leading-edge protrusions decrease the disturbance torque due to the flow fluctuation between the arm and disk and in the wake flow, although the low-frequency disturbance torque due to the pulsatile flow can be deteriorated.