A novel suspension arm with 2-dimensional actuation, for flying height control and high-bandwidth track following in advanced hard disk drives

A novel suspension arm with 2-dimensional actuation has been developed. While retaining present technology to give coarse positioning of the head, the arm while making use of embedded piezoelectric materials is intended to provide high-bandwidth data tracking when fully integrated in a hard disk drive environment. This is known as dual-stage actuation. The suspension arm also has the added feature of adjusting the flying height of the head with great precision and accuracy. The arm developed is tested dynamically and characterised. Specialised closed-loop control algorithms are developed to position and control each dimension of motion independently.