Quick search Find article
Quick search
Find article

A piezoelectric quad-morph actuated suspension for hard disk drives

Gih Keong Lau1 and Hejun Du2

Show affiliations


This paper presents a new milli-actuator using a piezoelectric quad-morph for fine head positioning in hard disk drives (HDDs). The newly proposed piezoelectric quad-morph is configured to produce a diagonal actuation, driving a parallel mechanism embodied into a suspension base plate into a lateral stroke. Finite element modeling shows the actuated suspension achieves a high sway frequency of 13 kHz and an adequate stroke. A parametric study shows that extending the lengths of the quad-morph and the parallel beams can improve both the sway frequency and the lateral stroke. The actuated suspension can also be reinforced with ribs for enhancing shock resistance and dynamic performance, yet without compromising lateral stroke generation. A prototype of the new design is fabricated and manually assembled using a bulk piezoelectric plate and a photo-chemically machined 0.1 mm thick stainless steel load beam. The driving principle of the quad-morph is tested and proven a viable and economical method to accomplish fine head positioning.


PACS

85.70.Li Other magnetic recording and storage devices (including tapes, disks, and drums)

85.50.-n Dielectric, ferroelectric, and piezoelectric devices

07.07.Tw Servo and control equipment; robots

02.70.Dh Finite-element and Galerkin methods

Subjects

Computational physics

Electronics and devices

Condensed matter: electrical, magnetic and optical

Instrumentation and measurement

Dates

Issue 9 (September 2006)

Received 2 May 2006, in final form 15 June 2006

Published 28 July 2006



View by subject




Export






Please login to access our web services, or create an account if you don't yet have one.

You must have cookies enabled in your web browser to be able to login.

Username
Password

Forgotten your password? Get a new one here.