Hitachi GST successfully models oil-air interfaces in Fluid Dynamic Bearings of hard disk drives using CFD-ACE+


Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) was founded in 2003 as a result of the strategic combination of IBM and Hitachi’s storage technology businesses. Hitachi GST is positioned to immediately advance the role of hard disk drives beyond traditional computing environments to consumer electronics and other emerging applications. Hitachi GST offers a comprehensive product portfolio unsurpassed in the industry - including 1-inch, 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch hard disk drive storage devices
Challenge
- Optimizing the design of fluid dynamic bearings (FDBs) that are so small and inaccessible that it is difficult to see or measure them
- Building a scaled up physical model to validate a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model

Hitachi GST successfully models oil-air interfaces in Fluid Dynamic Bearings of hard disk drives using CFD-ACE+.
Benefits
- The CFD model demonstrated the ability to predict the performance of the scale-up model
- In the future, the CFD model can be scaled down and used to investigate alternative FDB designs