Six-DOF vibrations of partial contact sliders in hard disk drives

A six-degree-of-freedom slider dynamic simulator is developed to analyze the slider's motion in the vertical, pitch, roll, yaw, length and width directions. The modified time-dependent Reynolds equation is used to model the air bearing and a new second order slip model is used for a bounded contact air bearing pressure. The simulator considers the air bearing shear acting on the air bearing surface and the slider-disk contact and adhesion. Simulation results are analyzed for the effects of the disk surface micro-waviness and roughness, skew angle, slider-disk friction and micro-trailing pad width on the vertical bouncing, down-track and off-track vibrations of a micro-trailing pad partial contact slider.