Robust Optimum Design of Thrust Hydrodynamic Bearings for Hard Disk Drives

Abstract

This paper describes the robust optimum design which combines the geometrical optimization method proposed by Hashimoto and statistical method. Recently, 2.5″ hard disk drives (HDDs) are widely used for mobile devices such as laptops, video cameras and car navigation systems. In mobile applications, high durability towards external vibrations and shocks are essentials to the bearings of HDD spindle motor. In addition, the bearing characteristics are influenced by manufacturing error because of small size of the bearings of HDD. In this paper, the geometrical optimization is carried out to maximize the bearing stiffness using sequential quadratic programming to improve vibration characteristics. Additionally, the bearing stiffness is analyzed considering dimensional tolerance of the bearing using statistical method. The dimensional tolerance is assumed to distribute according to the Gaussian distribution, and then the bearing stiffness is estimated by combining the expectation and standard deviation. As a result, in the robust optimum design, new groove geometry of bearing can be obtained in which the bearing stiffness is four times higher than the stiffness of conventional spiral groove bearing. Moreover, the bearing has lower variability compared with the result of optimum design neglecting dimensional tolerance.