Effects of Track-Seeking Motion on the Flying Attitudes of Ultralow Flying Sliders

The flying height (FH) change during a track-seeking motion becomes of significant concern for ultralow flying sliders. The presence of nanoscale adhesion forces, such as intermolecular and electrostatic forces, can adversely decrease the FH and even cause head-disk impact. A quasi-static approximation of track-seeking motion is proposed here, which if sufficiently accurate can substantially decrease the computation time over that required for a dynamic analysis. The track-seeking performances of four different air bearing surface (ABS) designs are numerically investigated by the quasi-static approximation, and the results are compared with those computed by the CML Dynamic Simulator. The former gives good agreements with the latter but with much less computation effort. The effects of various factors causing FH changes are presented and compared quantitatively. The effective skew angle is found to be the dominant factor, but the inertia effect is also not negligible. Two designs, called Scorpion III and IV, designed previously as active FH control sliders, are found to exhibit an enhancement in track-seeking performance, compared with two other conventional ABS designs