Efficient simulation of hard disk drive operational shock response using model order reduction

The complex structure, coupled mechanical and fluidic energy domains, and inherent nonlinearity of air bearing between slider and disk involved in the hard disk drive (HDD) are normally presented as a large scale problem which will result in very heavy computational costs in terms of intensive computation and time consuming for HDD research communities and industries to carry out the transient dynamic simulation for HDD design verification, performance analysis, and optimization by using the traditional full-order models, such as finite element model (FEM). This paper presents a method of application of model order reduction (MOR) technique to dramatically reduce the computation time for HDD transient shock performance analysis while capturing the behaviors of original problem faithfully. The reduced models are obtained by performing MOR directly to the FEMs through Krylov subspace and Arnoldi algorithm. The transient operational shock response results of the reduced models of a head suspension assembly (HSA) subjected to half-sine shock pulse demonstrate that the reduced models can dramatically reduce total computation by at least three orders and have very good agreement with those simulated from the original large problem by full-order FEM.