Suppressing flow-induced vibration of HGA by an acoustic PZT actuator in hard disk drives

The reliability and stability of hard disk drives (HDDs) is especially important as the areal recording density increasing rapidly target to 10 Tb/in2 in the future. The vibration of the Head Gimbals Assembly (HGA) is inevitable by internal fluid flow during operational process. In order to improve this undesirable problem, an acoustic piezoelectric transducer (PZT) actuator which can be used to transform an electric current to an acoustic pressure field, is glued on the HDD cover inner surface to generate acoustic pressure to suppress the flow-induced off-plate vibration (FIOPV) of the HGA. In this paper, a three-dimensional finite element model of HDD is built with an acoustic PZT actuator. The FIOPV of the HGA in the air and helium-filled drives are investigated by fluid---structure interaction simulation method. The acoustic pressure induced vibration (APIV) of the HGA is analyzed by acoustics-piezoelectric-structure interaction simulation method. After that, the suppressed FIOPV after superposing the APIV and the FIOPV is obtained by following the superposition principle.