IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 38, NO.

5, SEPTEMBER 2002

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Design Sensitivity Analysis of Air-Lubricated Slider Bearings

Sang-Joon Yoon, Min-Soo Kim, and Dong-Hoon Choi

AbstractWe present the design sensitivity analysis for two pico sliders. The discrete form of the generalized lubrication equation based on a control volume formulation is used as the equations of equilibrium to analyze air-lubricated slider bearings. The residual function for the force equilibrium of the slider is employed as a constraint function. The design variables are the slider thickness parameters at all grid cells, determining the topological geometry of air-bearing surfaces. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach while the amount of calculation is reduced by 97% in comparison with the conventional finite difference approximation. Index TermsAdjoint variable method, design sensitivity analysis, slider bearing.

II. DESIGN SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS A. Complicated Adjoint Variable Equation To solve the generalized lubrication equation, an implicit control volume scheme [4] based on the convection-diffusion formulation is employed [5] and the total discrete equilibrium equations can be represented in a matrix form (1) is the pressure vector and is a thickness paramwhere refers to the coefficient matrix eter vector of the ABS. of the discrete governing equation, which is highly nonlinear and asymmetric unlike that of the conventional structural analis the coefficient vector generated by the boundary ysis. conditions, which is also nonlinear. Consider now the residual function that represents the slider in equilibrium of air-bearing force as an equality constraint. Thus, our attention is focused on finding the derivatives of the residual function with respect to the thickness parameters of the slider, satisfying the total equilibrium equation. To effectively meet (1), we add a compatible condition multiplied by an adjoint variable vector as shown in the form (2) This adjoint vector will then be selected to satisfy the equations that lead to the elimination of the implicit differentiation through the dependence on the pressure. Using the chain rule of differentiation, we obtain the total derivative of the functional with respect to the th design variable. To represent the total derivative , we rearrange it of the functional as an implicit form of as

I. INTRODUCTION HE sophisticated geometry of air-bearing surface (ABS) allows the ultralow flying height of the slider over the recording band. The increased design flexibility brings a new challenge, finding the optimal configuration of the slider. Although many optimization works for ABS design have been presented, most of them have concentrated on changing only the basic shapes by simplifying the configuration parameters of the ABS [1][3]. To overcome these restricted design approaches, a topology optimization should be employed. However, this problem has too many design variables since the finite mesh should be fine enough to represent the overall geometry of the ABS. Thus, the analytical design sensitivity analysis (DSA) is strongly required. The adjoint sensitivity analysis is a way to obtain the derivatives as it is too hard to obtain the derivatives of state variables. Unlike the linear structural analysis such as the finite-element method (FEM), the discrete system equations of air-lubricated slider bearings have highly nonlinear asymmetric coefficient matrix and vector. Hence, the conventional DSA method cannot directly be applied to air-lubricated slider bearing system. The goal of this study is to suggest an analytical DSA for air-lubricated slider bearings by employing the adjoint variable method and to apply it to two sample ABS models.

(3)
Manuscript received February 8, 2002; revised June 5, 2002. This work was supported by the Center of Innovative Design Optimization Technology (iDOT), Korea Science and Engineering Foundation. The authors are with the iDOT Center, Hanyang University, Seoul 133-791, Korea (e-mail: ysjyoon@hanyang.ac.kr; idol99@hitel.net; dhchoi@hanyang.ac.kr). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMAG.2002.802793.

To avoid calculating the derivative of the pressure, an adjoint equation of (4) is generated. Finally, the total derivative of the functional is briefly defined as (5), as in (4) and (5), shown at the bottom of the next page. Note that the matrix is a block tridiagonal, in which each nonzero block consists of tridiagonal

0018-9464/02$17.00 2002 IEEE

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 38, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2002

and diagonal with a special rule [5]. Hence, (4) can be briefly rewritten in the form

Substitute ( , ) for ( , ) at (7)(9) and consider the relation to neighboring points over the control volume faces. Finally, the components of the matrix are defined as

(6) where the complicated coefficient matrix is also a block tridiagonal and will be mentioned in the next chapter. Conclusively, if the complicated adjoint equation for is once solved, we can easily find all derivatives of the functional with . respect to the design variables without solving B. Numerical Analysis , Both the coefficient matrix and vector consist of , , , and [4], which are the coefficient terms at the control volume and the function of pressure. Denoting the coefficient at and the pressure at a grid point a control volume ( , ) as , we can find the derivative of as ( , ) as (10) Consider now the residual function of force equilibrium [6] as a constraint function in the form (7) (11) Using the chain rule of differentiation, we can obtain the derivative of the constraint in the form (12) Considering FEM based structural optimization, the adjoint method typically requires the derivatives of the stiffness matrix and the load vectors with respect to design variables. Since these derivatives are often difficult to calculate analytically, a semianalytical approach has been popular [7]. Thus, we circumvent the enormous effort required to obtain analytical derivatives of and by using first-order finite difference method. is asymmetric and especially block Note that the matrix tridiagonal, with each nonzero block being either tridiagonal or diagonal. For numerical calculation of (6), the alternating direction implicit (ADI) scheme is employed, which is efficient in the large-scale problem in special band storage. III. COMPUTATAL RESULTS A computer program for the proposed DSA is developed and applied to two pico sliders [3] optimally designed as shown in Fig. 1. They have a shallow step to simplify the manufacturing

Here, if

then and if then . If not , (7) becomes zero. The derivatives of , , can be expressed as

(8)

where, if

(or ) and then the value of of (8) exists. However, if not, then this becomes , , and zero. Following the same idea, the derivatives of can be generated. The derivative of is

(9)

(4) (5)

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YOON et al.: DESIGN SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF AIR-LUBRICATED SLIDER BEARINGS

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(a)

(a)

(b) Fig. 1. Pico slider models: (a) NEW1 slider and (b) NEW2 slider. TABLE I COMPARISON OF DSA RESULTS

(b) Fig. 2. DSA results: (a) NEW1 slider and (b) NEW2 slider.

IV. SUMMARY process, an oblique shape at the front region to prevent wear particles and a wide recess to increase the air-bearing stiffness. The read/write head is installed in the trailing edge of the central rail to reduce the influence of roll motion. The grid system is 98 98 and the number of grid cells or design variables is 9409 ). ( To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, we randomly select several grid cells at the recess, shallow step and rail regions of NEW2 slider and directly compare their solutions with those of the finite difference approximation (FDA) as listed in Table I. All of the simulation results present very small discrepancies, which may be due to the step size selection of FDA. To estimate the influence of the geometric variation generated by wearness, manufacturing tolerances and etc., the overall magnitudes of DSA results with respect to the topological parameters of model sliders are shown in Fig. 2. The darkness of the shading refers to the magnitude of the design sensitivity. They clearly show that the trailing rail regions and the boundary regions of shallow step are sensitive to the thickness parameters of the ABS. Our approach can obtain the total derivatives with respect to all design variables in only 568 s, while FDA needs 21 736 s (6.04 h), on a Pentium III 866 MHz personal computer. It reveals that the proposed approach is very efficient in total computing time since the design sensitivities to all design variables can be found by solving the adjoint equation only once regardless of the number of design variables. This paper presents the DSA results of two slider models. A complicated adjoint equation is generated to find the derivatives of the residual function while satisfying the discrete generalized lubrication equation. The slider thickness parameters of grid cells are chosen as design variables. The design sensitivities of the sliders are automatically simulated, and the comparison of those results shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The proposed DSA is believed to be indispensable to the topology optimization of sliders due to the considerable reduction of the computational time.

REFERENCES
[1] S.-J. Yoon and D.-H. Choi, Design optimization of the taper-flat slider positioned by a rotary actuator, ASME J. Tribol., vol. 117, no. 4, pp. 588593, 1995. [2] M. A. OHara, Y. Hu, and D. B. Bogy, Effects of slider sensitivity optimization, IEEE Trans. Magn., vol. 32, pp. 37443746, Sept. 1996. [3] T.-S. Kang and D.-H. Choi, Optimal design of HDD air-lubricated slider bearings for improving dynamic characteristics and operating performance, ASME J. Tribol., vol. 123, pp. 541547, 2001. [4] S. V. Patankar, Numerical Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980. [5] Y. Hu and D. B. Bogy, Solution of the rarefied gas lubrication equation using an additive correction based multigrid control volume method, ASME J. Tribol., vol. 120, pp. 280288, 1998. [6] D.-H. Choi and S.-J. Yoon, Static analysis of flying characteristics of the head slider by using an optimization technique, ASME J. Tribol., vol. 116, pp. 9094, 1994. [7] R. T. Haftka and Z. Gurdal, Elements of Structural Optimization, 3rd ed. Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1992.

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