Binary Mixture Film of Perfluoropolyether Lubricants

It has become more and more difficult to find a single lubricant meeting all the requirements for ultra-small head-media spacing hard disk drives (HDDs). Therefore, an appropriate mixture of lubricants may be a feasible and promising alternative for future HDDs. In this paper, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations employing a bead-spring model were performed to examine the detailed structure, conformation, and dynamics of binary mixture lubricant nano films by extensively analyzing the anisotropic radius of gyration and the self-diffusion coefficient as a function of composition. Our simulation analysis indicates that a binary (or even a ternary) mixture monolayer can be a more suitable disk lubricant as compared to a single component lubricant. The conformation and mobility change by tuning the volume fraction was examined in conjunction with the optimal lubricant selection.