R&D: Study of Nanoscale Heat Transfer in HDD Head-Disk Interface Based On Static Touchdown Experiment

IEEE Transactions on Magnetics has published an article written by Yuan Ma, Department of Mechanical Engineering, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA, and Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M, College Station, TX 77843, USA, Amin Ghafari, Yuying Wu, and David Bogy, Department of Mechanical Engineering, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

Abstract: “Understanding the heat transfer behavior at the nanoscale head-disk interface (HDI) in hard disk drives is crucial for head design, media design and failure analysis of current hard disk drive (HDD) industry, especially for the emerging technologies including heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), microwave assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) and two dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR). Previous experimental studies of the static touchdown technique and theoretical developments of the wave based phonon conduction have both shown enhanced heat transfer at the HDI. To better understand the heat transfer behavior across the HDI, a series of simulation are necessary to connect the theory and the detailed geometric model of the HDI. In this paper, we developed a finite element model to explain the temperature change of the head during a static touchdown experiment. The wave based phonon conduction theory is integrated into the simulation through iteration. The simulation results trend in agreement with the theoretical development and the experimental results. This simulation strategy can also be implemented for flying heads to predict the heat transfer behavior under HAMR conditions.“