Airflow-Simulation by Voxel Mesh Method for Complete Hard Disk Drive Structure

Numerical fluid simulation based on the voxel-mesh method was applied to the whole structure of 3.5-inch hard-disk drives. The voxel mesh of a hard-disk drive (HDD) including all components can be generated automatically from a computer-aided design (CAD) software in a short time. The simulation results were compared with the experimental measurements by particle image velocimetry (PIV). The airflow simulation with a whole-HDD-structure model exhibits a better agreement with the PIV results than that of a partial model (namely, a calculation region sliced between two disks) does, and it indicates the existence of an entire flow (from between the disks, up between the shroud gap and filter area, and onto the top disk) in the vertical direction throughout the HDD. This method is useful for airflow simulation of a model with complicated geometry such as that of hard disk drives.