Effect of Flexible Cable and Friction Force of Small Form Factor Hard Disk Drive

In recent years, the demand for portable digital devices such as cellular phone, digital camera, and MP3 player has been largely increased. To meet the requirements of such portable applications the information storage devices with smaller size, higher capacity, and lower power consumption are needed. A small form factor (SFF) HDD using a load/unload (L/UL) system is one of the appropriate alternatives to satisfy these requirements. Due to complexity of L/UL process and mechanism, it is required to investigate for better understanding the effects of design parameters. Among the various design parameters, flexible cable and friction force on the L/UL ramp become important to the dynamic characteristics of L/UL process as the system is miniaturized. The program for L/UL simulation which considers the effect of flexible cable and L/UL ramp is needed. Unfortunately, there is hardly any commercial program for the L/UL simulation except the Computer Mechanics Laboratory (CML) air bearing design program and the CML L/UL simulation code. Furthermore, the design parameters such as flexible cable and the L/UL ramp are not considered in the CML L/UL simulation code. So we embody the L/UL simulation considering flexible cable and an L/UL ramp by using the ANSYS/LS-DYNA. In this thesis, the effects of flexible cable and friction force on the dynamic characteristics and the performances of the L/UL process are studied. Numerical simulation and related experiments are carried out and compared each other.