Nonlinear air-bearing slider modeling and optimizing for hard disk drives with ultra-low flying heights

A Two-DOF nonlinear air-bearing model is proposed to investigate the dynamic behavior of air-bearing sliders for HDDs with ultra-low flying heights. A modified Newmark β method is developed for solving the nonlinear dynamic equations. Numerical results show obvious nonlinear behavior for air-bearing sliders with ultra-low flying heights. The length of the pressure centers at the trailing edge and the leading edge are chosen as the parameters to be optimized. Based on the traditional simplex method, a modified simplex method is presented. The dynamics are compared between the optimized slider and the original one both in time and frequency domain. The results show the optimized slider has better dynamic property than the original one, and the other parameters could also be optimized by adjusting some objective function module.