Robust design of a HDD spindle system supported by fluid dynamic bearings utilizing the stability analysis of five degrees of freedom of a general rotor-bearing system

Abstract

This paper proposes a method to improve the robustness of a hard disk drive (HDD) spindle supported by fluid dynamic bearings (FDBs) by utilizing the stability analysis of the five degrees of freedom of a general rotor-bearing system. The Reynolds equations and the perturbed equations of the coupled journal and thrust bearings were solved by FEM to calculate the dynamic coefficients. The paper introduces the radius of gyration to the equations of motion in order to consistently define the stability problem with respect to a single variable, i.e., the mass. The critical mass, which is the threshold between the stability and instability of the HDD spindle, is determined by solving the linear equations of motion. The proposed method was applied to improve the robustness of a HDD spindle supported by FDBs by varying the groove parameters. It shows that the optimized groove design obtained using the proposed method increases both the stability and the modal damping ratio of the half-speed whirl mode. This research also determines the motions of the rotating disk-spindle system by solving its nonlinear equations of motion with the Runge–Kutta method. It shows that the groove design optimized using the proposed method has a small whirl radius in the steady state. It also shows that it has very little displacement due to the shock excitation, and that it quickly recovers to the equilibrium state.