The Effect of Thermal Radiation on Thermal Flying Height Control Sliders

Thermal flying height control (TFC) technology has recently been applied in hard disk drives. In calculating the thermal deformation caused by the resistance heater, radiation as predicted by Plank´s blackbody radiation law is usually neglected because of its small magnitude compared to conduction. Recent experimental investigations have shown that Planck´s law breaks down in a small gap of nano-scale dimensions and that the heat transfer coefficient at distances on the order of nano-meters can exceed Plank´s blackbody radiation by more than three orders of magnitude. This paper investigates numerically the effect of enhanced thermal radiation for thermal flying height control sliders at very small flying heights.