Dynamics of head-disk contact/impact in magnetic recording

One of the critical areas of the magnetic storage process is the dynamics of suspending a magnetic recording head over a rotating rigid disk while maintaining a finite clearance between the disk and the slider carrying the head. However, recent experimental work reported in [1,2] presents evidence of head-disk contact during certain operations, for instance, during track access. Numerical simulation programs such as the ones that adopt the methods described in [3,4,5] are widely used in the Magnetic Recording industry to study head-disk interaction, but they are not capable of handling head-disk contacts. In the present work, a simulation tool is developed and applied to analyze the dynamics of a slider flying under the influence of aerodynamic forces and subject to intermittent contact by rapidly moving disk surface defects such as localized asperities.