Thousand-Fold Oil-Air Interface Scale-Up in Fluid Dynamic Bearings of Hard Disk Drives

Research and development of fluid dynamic bearings (FDBs) of hard disk drives is hampered by their geometry which ranges from fractions of micrometers to millimeters. A 1000 X scale-up of the oil-air interface in a single land/groove section of an FDB affords excellent optical access to flow details, while preserving the Reynolds number and Capillary number. The main penalty for this convenience is an inability to maintain the Bond number. The experiment also serves to validate computational fluid dynamic work, based on the volume of fluid method. A direct comparison is presented