Abstract
Adhesion is the key factor influencing the failure of the hard disk drive operating under ultra-low flying height. In order to mitigate the negative effects of adhesion at the head–disk interface (HDI) and promote further development of the thermal flying height control (TFC) technology, an adhesive contact model based on the Lifshitz theory accounting for the thermal protrusion (TP) geometry of TFC slider, the layered structures of the head and disk, and the operation states of the slider was proposed to investigate the static contact characteristics at the HDI. The simulation results demonstrated the undesirable unstable regions during the transitions between different operation states and the necessity of applying TFC technology. The reduction in the head–media spacing (HMS) was found to be achieved by properly increasing the TP height, decreasing the thickness of the lubricant layer or the thickness of the diamond–like carbon (DLC) layer during the flying state or the TP–lube contact state. At the TP–DLC contact regime, the attractive interaction was stronger than other states, and the strong repulsive interaction made the HMS difficult to be further reduced through the increase in the TP height or the decrease in the lubricant thickness.
Highlights
Hard disk drive (HDD) storage, because of its cheaper cost per stored data, still plays an important role in the world of digital data and the demand for its storage density increases with the explosive growth of information in recent years [1]
An extremely smooth slider and disk working under ultra-low flying height (FH) can lead to strong adhesive interactions at the head–disk interface (HDI), which may influence the dynamic properties of the slider
This paper is undertaken to establish a steady-state numerical adhesive contact model for the thermal flying height control (TFC) slider–disk interface based on the Lifshitz theory, capable of handling various recording status including the flying state, lubricant contact state and solid contact state
Summary
Hard disk drive (HDD) storage, because of its cheaper cost per stored data, still plays an important role in the world of digital data and the demand for its storage density increases with the explosive growth of information in recent years [1]. Optimization of the head–media spacing (HMS), defined as the distance from the bottom of the recording element on the head to the top of the magnetic layer on the disk, plays a pivotal role in achieving this demand [2,3]. Decreasing the FH through directly bringing the whole slider close to the disk may induce vibration and lead to a catastrophic crash of the slider [5]. To counteract such problems, a thermal flying height control (TFC) technology was proposed [6], which reduces the FH by heating an element in the head to yield a small thermal protrusion (TP). An extremely smooth slider and disk working under ultra-low FH can lead to strong adhesive interactions at the head–disk interface (HDI), which may influence the dynamic properties of the slider
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