Shock and head slap simulations of operational and non-operational hard disk drives

Summary form only given. Hard disk drives (HDD) must be designed to be resistant to shock. Two types of shock simulations are of particular interest, the linear drop test and the tilt drop test. In a linear drop test, all the components of the hard disk drive are given a vertical velocity component corresponding to a particular "drop height". In a tilt drop test, the hard disk drive is constrained to rotate about an axis such that one side of the HDD will contact the impact surface. The tilt drop model is given an initial angular velocity corresponding to a particular "drop angle". To perform the finite element analysis, we use LS-Dyna, a commercially available transient finite element solver. LS-Dyna is used in contact problems, large deformation and dynamic simulations. To prepare the model for LS-Dyna and display the results, we use Hypermesh, a commercially available pre- and post-processor.