The ever shortening product cycle for magnetic recording disk drives demands a fast and accurate numerical prediction of the slider’s flying characteristics during the design stage. A computationally efficient multigrid control volume method is developed in this paper for the solution of the very high bearing number and shaped rail air bearing problems. The control volume schemes for discretizing the Reynolds lubrication equation are based on various convection-diffusion formulations, while the solution of the resulting discretization equations is accelerated by an additive correction based multigrid method. A comparison study using the 50 percent tripad and Headway AAB sliders demonstrates a significant improvement in the solver’s performance as compared to the single-grid method.

Issue Section:
Research Papers
Topics:
Lubrication, Air bearings, Bearings, Convection, Cycles, Design, Diffusion (Physics), Disks, Magnetic recording, Rails
1.
Alexander
F. J.
,
Garcia
A. L.
, and
Alder
B. J.
,
1994
, “
Direct Simulation Monte Carlo for Thin-film Bearings
,”
Physics of Fluids
, Vol.
6
, No.
12
, pp.
3854
–
3860
.
2.
Brandt
A.
,
1977
, “
Multi-Level Adaptive Solutions to Boundary-Value Problems
,”
Mathematics of Computations
, Vol.
31
, pp.
333
–
390
.
3.
Castelli
V.
, and
Pirvics
J.
,
1968
, “
Review of Numerical Methods in Gas Bearing Film Analysis
,”
ASME JOURNAL OF LUBRICATION TECHNOLOGY
, Vol.
90
, pp.
777
–
792
.
4.
Cha
E.
, and
Bogy
D. B.
,
1995
, “
A Numerical Scheme for Static and Dynamic Simulation of Subambient Pressure Shaped Rail Sliders
,”
ASME JOURNAL OF TRIBOLOGY
, Vol.
117
, pp.
36
–
46
.
5.
Crone
R. M.
,
Jhon
M. S.
,
Bhushan
B.
, and
Karis
T. E.
,
1991
, “
Modeling the Flying Characteristics of a Rough Magnetic Head over a Rough Rigid-Disk Surface
,”
ASME JOURNAL OF TRIBOLOGY
, Vol.
113
, pp.
739
–
749
.
6.
Fukui
S.
, and
Kaneko
R.
,
1988
, “
Analysis of Ultra-Thin Gas Film Lubrication Based on Linearized Boltzmann Equation: First Report-Derivation of a Generalized Lubrication Equation Including Thermal Creep Flow
,”
ASME JOURNAL OF TRIBOLOGY
, Vol.
110
, pp.
335
–
341
.
7.
Garcia-Suarez, C., Bogy, D. B., and Talke, F. E., 1984, “Use of an Upwind Finite Element Scheme for Air Bearing Calculations,” ASLE SP-16, pp. 90–96.
8.
Hutchinson
B. R.
, and
Raithby
G. D.
,
1986
, “
A Multigrid Method Based on the Additive Correction Strategy
,”
Numerical Heat Transfer
, Vol.
9
, pp.
511
–
537
.
9.
Hutchinson
B. R.
,
Galpin
P. F.
, and
Raithby
G. D.
,
1988
, “
Application of Additive Correction Multigrid to the Coupled Fluid Flow Equations
,”
Numerical Heat Transfer
, Vol.
13
, pp.
133
–
147
.
10.
Kogure
K.
,
Fukui
S.
,
Mitsuya
Y.
, and
Kaneko
R.
,
1983
, “
Design of Negative Pressure Slider for Magnetic Recording Disks
,”
ASME JOURNAL OF LUBRICATION TECHNOLOGY
, Vol.
7
, pp.
496
–
502
.
11.
Miu
D.
, and
Bogy
D. B.
,
1986
, “
Dynamics of Gas-Lubricated Slider Bearings in Magnetic Recording Disk Files: Part II-Numerical Simulation
,”
ASME JOURNAL OF TRIBOLOGY
, Vol.
108
, pp.
589
–
593
.
12.
Patankar, S. V., 1980, Numerical Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow, McGraw-Hill, New York.
13.
Patankar
S. V.
,
1981
, “
A Calculation Procedure for Two-Dimensional Elliptic Situations
,”
Numerical Heat Transfer
, Vol.
4
, pp.
409
–
425
.
14.
Peng
J. P.
, and
Hardie
C. E.
,
1995
“
A Finite Element Scheme for Determining the Shaped Rail Slider Flying Characteristics with Experimental Confirmation
,”
ASME JOURNAL OF TRIBOLOGY
, Vol.
117
, pp.
136
–
142
.
15.
Ruiz
O. J.
, and
Bogy
D. B.
,
1990
, “
A Numerical Simulation of the Head-Disk Assembly in Magnetic Hard Disk; 1. Component Models
,”
ASME JOURNAL OF TRIBOLOGY
, Vol.
112
, pp.
593
–
602
.
16.
Settari
A.
, and
Aziz
K.
,
1973
, “
A Generalization of the Additive Correction Methods for the Iterative Solution of Matrix Equations
,”
SIAM Journal of Numerical Analysis
, Vol.
10
, pp.
506
–
521
.
17.
Smith
P. A.
, and
Iwan
W. D.
,
1991
, “
Dynamic Figures of Merit for the Design of Gas-Lubricated Slider Bearings
,”
ASME Advances in Information Storage Systems
, Vol.
3
, pp.
41
–
53
.
18.
Vanka
S. P.
,
1986
, “
Block Implicit Multigrid Solution of Navier-Stokes Equations in Primitive Variables
,”
Journal of Computational Physics
, Vol.
65
, pp.
138
–
158
.
19.
Wahl
M. H.
,
Lee
P. R.
, and
Talke
F. E.
,
1996
, “
An Efficient Finite Element-Based Air Bearing Simulator for Pivoted Slider Bearings using Bi-Conjugate Gradient Algorithms
,”
Tribology Transactions of STLE
, Vol.
39
, pp.
130
–
138
.
20.
White
J. M.
, and
Nigam
A.
,
1980
, “
A Factored Implicit Scheme for the Numerical Solution of the Reynolds Equation at Very Low Spacing
,”
ASME JOURNAL OF LUBRICATION TECHNOLOGY
, Vol.
102
, pp.
80
–
85
.
This content is only available via PDF.
Copyright © 1998
 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers
You do not currently have access to this content.