A CFD investigation of airflow in a hard disk drive production line to detect the cause(s) of contamination and its mitigation

Abstract

Contamination exceeds the standards in certain areas within the production line of hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturing, such as in the clean room of a factory. In order to find the cause(s) and solve the problem, we decided to use the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to simulate the airflow within the production line. The results show the cause of contamination, which is from the exhaust fan installed in the electrical testing machine in the production line of HDD manufacturing, which releases large amounts of particles. To resolve this problem, the CFD results were analyzed to design and create a new cover for the exhaust fan. Once this invention is installed to the electrical testing machine, it can control the airflow to float into other areas that do not affect nor contaminate the product. The factory utilized this research. Other than solving contamination problems that exceed standards, it also saves production costs from purchasing new machines as well.