The improvement of deformations and charateristics of HGA during clamping using finite element analysis

This paper presents the study of Head Gimbal Assembly (HGA) clamping for characteristic parameters measurement which is an important stage of hard disk drive assembly process. During clamping, HGA is deformed. The values of static attitude and gram load which are significant characteristics of HGA are affected and could exceed acceptable values. Consequently, a lot of HGAs are rejected or these might decrease the performance and the read-write precision of hard disk drive. In this research, finite element analysis is performed to study the behaviors of HGA under various clamping forces and configurations for the process development. Results show that using lower clamping force and having rectangular shape for the upper part and with fillet for the lower part of clamping unit have less deformation than the other configurations of clamping. These make considerable improvement of parameter measurement during HGA clamping process efficiently and effectively.