Turbulent Flows in Hard Disk Drives

This monograph is based on the doctoral thesis of the author at the University of California, Berkeley (2006). The text outlines a com-putational investigation of the turbulent air flow in hard disk drives and the resulting impact of the flow on the vibrations of various drive components. This work mainly uses Large Eddy Simulation (LES) imple-mented in commercial CFD codes to simulate the complex flow fields. After the basic features of the flow are explored, a comparison of different LES models and several commercial CFD codes is presented. Extensive validation is performed with experimental data and grid convergence studies are described. Finally the LES results are used to compute the vibrations of the rotating disk and the head-gimbal assembly (HGA). The HGA vibrations are also computed with the presence of several flow mitigation devices. This work will be of interest to scientists and engineers in the hard drive industry, general practitioners of CFD, and researchers in the LES field.