Abrasive jet machining for the microprofile control patterning of herringbone grooves

Fluid bearings have features of high speed and high rotation accuracy, and therefore, they are used in spindle motors of hard disk drives, cooling fans of central processing units, and other devices. Further, these bearings have microherringbone grooves on the shaft or sleeve inner surface that help generate dynamic pressure in the lubricant fluid around the shaft. Although the depth of the groove is constant, dynamic pressure can be increased by decreasing the depth from both ends to the central corner of each groove on a micron scale. This study aims to verify the effect of sloped herringbone grooves using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis and to develop a new microfabrication method for manufacturing microsloped herringbone grooves on the shaft surface using abrasive jet machining. The generated dynamic pressure is analyzed using CFD; the results indicated that the sloped herringbone grooves result in an increase in the dynamic pressure at the groove tips and cause a decrease in the fluctuations in dynamic pressure in the circumferential direction.