A Method to Reduce Calculation Time for a Study of a Damper Plate in a High Speed Hard Disk Drive Simulation

The damper plate effect in a hard disk drive is studied using computational fluid dynamics technique. The well known Large Eddy Simulation technique needs high resources for computing power and time. This study presents a steady k-e turbulent model which needs lower resources but can predict the flow effect. The 3.5 inch hard disk drive is modeled with a hexahedral mesh for the computational domain. First, the RMS velocities of the model without damper plate and head stack assembly compared with LES and the transient k-e method are less than 6 %. After that, the damper plate is inserted into the model and the RMS velocity is compared using 4 methods which are LES, transient k-e, steady-transient k-e and steady k-e respectively. The results of k-e are very close to each other. The RMS velocity errors compared with LES rises up to 12.35-13.20 percent in the middle diameter zone, where there is an effect from diverted flow. The steady k-e provides a good computing time with 20 min/100 iterations and can show the trend of the damper plate effect which can be used usefully in future design work for various variables.