Investigations of Adhesion under Different Slider-Lube/Disk Contact States at the Head–Disk Interface

Adhesion is the key factor influencing the failure of the hard disk drive operating under ultra-low flying height. In order to mitigate the negative effects of adhesion at the head–disk interface (HDI) and promote further development of the thermal flying height control (TFC) technology, an adhesive contact model based on the Lifshitz theory accounting for the thermal protrusion (TP) geometry of TFC slider, the layered structures of the head and disk, and the operation states of the slider was proposed to investigate the static contact characteristics at the HDI. The simulation results demonstrated the undesirable unstable regions during the transitions between different operation states and the necessity of applying TFC technology. The reduction in the head–media spacing (HMS) was found to be achieved by properly increasing the TP height, decreasing the thickness of the lubricant layer or the thickness of the diamond–like carbon (DLC) layer during the flying state or the TP–lube contact state. At the TP–DLC contact regime, the attractive interaction was stronger than other states, and the strong repulsive interaction made the HMS difficult to be further reduced through the increase in the TP height or the decrease in the lubricant thickness.