• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.1886-1896
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• 1991

This paper presents a method to predict the flying height of the head slider in a hard disk drive. Quantitative predicts of the flying height according to the variations of the external load and the disk velocity have been done by numerical computation. In addition, the magnitude of the external load to keep flying height constant were also suggested. The Modified Reynolds' equation driven from hydrodynamic lubrication theory under slip flow condition was used to describe air-bearing system under the slider. To solve the equation, a Finite Volume Method (FVM) has been applied. To determine the final minimum flying height and pitch angle of the head slider, the Secant iteration method is used which update initial guess of the minimum flying height and pitch angle of the slider. In this study, the model head slider has been selected from a real hard disk drive which is equipped in many commercial personal computers. As a result, as the disk velocity increases at constant external load, the minimum flying height and the pitch angle increase due to the in crease of the air-bearing force at the bottom of slider.