Self-sensing actuators with passive damping for adaptive vibration control of hard disk drives

Abstract

A push–pull piezoelectrically actuated devices have been developed for higher bandwidth servo systems as microactuators for fine and fast positioning, while the voice coil motor functions as a large but coarse seeking. However, the current dual-stage actuator design uses piezoelectric patches only and therefore a dual-stage servo system using enhanced active–passive hybrid micro piezoelectric actuators is proposed to improve the existing dual-stage actuators for higher precision and shock resistance, due to the incorporation of passive damping in the design. In this paper, three different configurations of self-sensing actuators (SSAs) incorporating an adaptive mechanism for vibration control of suspensions in dual-stage hard disk drives (HDDs) are investigated. In the piezo-based SSA configuration, the signal sensed due to mechanical deformation is mixed with the control input signal, which would be corrupted due to the variation of the piezoelectric capacitance when a fixed bridge circuit is used. In this study, a self-tuning adaptive compensation is used to combine with the SSA technique to extract the true sensing signal for the vibration control of suspensions in HDDs. An assembled suspension with piezoelectric microactuators is tested to demonstrate the vibration suppression performance of this adaptive structure under an external shock disturbance such as hammer excitation. The experimental results show that the target vibration modes have been suppressed effectively with using the adaptive positive position feedback controller for the enhanced SSAs with passive damping in HDDs.