Numerical Modeling for the Characterization of Flow Excitation for the HDD Disk Vibration Control

This article presents a modeling method for air flow analysis of a hard disk drive. Air flow excitation causes disk vibration that aggravates TMR budget of the design of modern high performance hard drives. And it is the most expensive budget consumer so that controlling of the flutter becomes the primary design issue of the data storage industry. In the presented work, air flow excitation forces are characterized by LES modeling and the results are verified with experiments. A squeeze-film-type disk damper is employed in the experiments and it is applied for a hardware design improvement for disk flutter reduction. LES and RANS are compared and alternately used in a calculation in order to minimize computational efforts.