Spreading Kinetics of Lubricant Droplets on Magnetic Recording Disks

Quantifying the mobility of lubricants on disk surfaces can be critical to designing reliable head-disk interfaces for disk drives. To achieve good reliability, the designer needs to optimize the tradeoff between lubricant mobility and bonding, as increased mobility is beneficial for reducing wear and increased bonding (which reduces mobility) is beneficial for decreasing lubricant loss due to spinoff and evaporation and for decreasing lubricant pickup on slider surfaces.