New Designs of HDD Air-Lubricated Sliders Via Topology Optimization

Optimization is an efficient tool for developing designs of slider air bearings that meet the strict performance demands of current hard disk drives. Previous studies in this field concentrated on determining the optimal size and shape of the air-bearing surface for a specified initial design. The resulting optimal design has the same topology as that of the initial design. Therefore, the performance of the final optimal solution depends strongly on the initial design, which is chosen either intuitively or inspired by already existing designs. In this study, a topology optimization method is developed for determining the optimal slider configuration. First, the air-bearing surface is discretized by a uniform mesh. The optimization consists in determining whether the material contained in each element should be removed or not. Then, a genetic algorithm is employed for the determination of the optimal solution from the possible candidates. An example is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The resulting optimal design has a topology different from those of the initial designs and possesses improved performance.