Study of aerodynamic vibration mechanism of HDD arms with unsteady analysis and its experimental verification

In this paper, we investigate aerodynamic phenomena occurring around the actuator arm of a hard disk drive using direct numerical simulation (DNS) and an experiment using laser Doppler vibrometer. Through numerical simulation we found a three-dimensional periodic spiral vortex in wake region of the actuator arm and that the weight-saving hole of an arm excites the vortex in contrast to an arm that has no hole. By experiment, we confirmed the presence of some peaks in the spectrum of arm torque.