Numerical Analysis on Lubrication Characteristics of Nanometer Gas Film in Hard Disk Drive

In this paper, a new numerical scheme to analyze the characteristics of the nanometer gas film in hard disk drive is presented based on the modified Reynolds equation with the FK-Boltzmann modified modeling. It is well known that the great high bearing number can lead to divergence in the conventional finite difference method. As to the existence of the variable pressure in the Couette flow terms in the equation, it was proposed to discretize equation by taking the Couette flow term as the dominating ones in iterative process. In addition, a special treatment by using weighting flow factor for the abrupt change of film thickness was proposed. It was presented that the result using this new scheme was close to the analytic solution. Using this new method to analyze several sliders, the pressure distribution of every slider can be successfully obtained with well convergence property, which indicated that this new scheme is a correct and stable numerical method.