A Study of contact Detection and Position Sensitivity of AE Sensor

In this study, a methodology is developed and confirmed to find the physical contact between the slider and disc due to the defects of disk during head seeking operation using acoustic emission (AE) signal. The head/disk contact was detected during random and standard seeks, whereas no contact was detected during track fellowing. During standard and random seeks, the torsion mode of slider excitation was observed at 680KHz. Therefore, it is thought that AE technique can be used as an alternative method of the glide test by monitoring existence of the torsional mode of the slider during seek operation or can be used to detect the spacing loss during seeking operation. By appropriately choosing the location of the sensor an order of magnitude increase in the sensitivity for RMS AE signal is observed. Therefore we can find take-off velocity clearly with high signal to noise ratio of AE signal.