Design of a Novel Compliant Transmission for Secondary Microactuators in Disk Drives

One of the bottlenecks limiting the data density in conventional disk drives is the resonant frequency of the suspension arm connecting the actuator and the read-write elements. In this paper we present a compliant transmission to be integrated with a secondary microactuator to deal with this limitation. The compliant transmission was designed to reduce overall footprint. This paper presents an optimization scheme which maximizes energy efficiency while constraining natural frequency, maximum stress, and axial loading. The final design meets both kinematic and dynamic criteria.