Contact of flying recording head sliders on continuous and patterned media

摘要

We conduct three-dimensional transient finite-element analysis to study the contact behavior during touch-down detection by a thermal flying-height control (TFC) recording head on continuous and patterned media. The heat generated during touch-down and the plastic strain of the media are calculated in the model. Various factors and parameters are investigated, such as the radius of curvature of the TFC protrusion, disk velocity, media substrate, media compositions and bit-patterned media (BPM). Our analysis shows that when subjected to the same TFC over-push, BPM is much more likely to result in plastic deformation than the continuous media. The temperature rises due to frictional heating reach 22 K and 16 K on continuous and BPM media, respectively.