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Lubricant Dewetting on the Slider’s Air-Bearing Surface in Hard Disk Drives

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Abstract

In current hard disk drives, the minimum air-bearing clearance is of the order of 1 nm during the read/write process. At this ultra-low spacing, lubricant from the disk often transfers to the slider’s air-bearing surface imposing a significant degradation of its performance. It is necessary to make accurate predictions of the lubricant’s response at the head–disk interface in order to engineer reliable hard disk drives. In this article, we perform numerical simulations to investigate the dewetting behavior of some perfluoropolyether lubricant films used in hard disk drives. We model the lubricant flow on the slider surface using a governing equation based on classical lubrication theory. We consider a disjoining pressure that approximates the properties of a ZTMD lubricant and compare the results with those obtained using a purely van der Waals disjoining pressure. We study the spreading of a lubricant film on a slider both at rest and while flying over a spinning disk. The effect of surface tension, air shear stress, and substrate roughness on the dewetting behavior of the film is also investigated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Mechanics Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Alejandro Rodriguez Mendez & David B. Bogy

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  1. Alejandro Rodriguez Mendez
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  2. David B. Bogy
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Correspondence to Alejandro Rodriguez Mendez.

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Mendez, A.R., Bogy, D.B. Lubricant Dewetting on the Slider’s Air-Bearing Surface in Hard Disk Drives. Tribol Lett 61, 22 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11249-016-0641-7

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