Numerical ball swaging analysis of head arm for hard disk drives

Ball swaging is a method of joining the head gimbal assembly (HGA) with the arm of an E-Block by plastically deforming part of the baseplate against the arm. However, the force of the plastic deformation causes deformation of the HGA, and can cause flying height, static attitude, and vibration of the HGA to vary. In this study, we performed an elasto-plastic large-deformation analysis for ball swaging. Using the experimental results, we verified the accuracy of the numerical results for ball swaging and determined the deformation mechanism and the effect of the ball swaging. From these results, we clarified that the baseplate is influenced by the arm deformation due to the asymmetric stress and the baseplate deformation is a superposition of the arm’s deformation on the baseplate’s own deformation.