Use of an upwind finite volume method to solve the air bearing problem of hard disk drives

In this paper we present an upwind higher order finite volume numerical scheme over unstructured triangular mesh to solve the slider air bearing problem of hard disk drives. The scheme is nodal based, which uses the median dual as the control volume. The convection part of the generalized Reynolds equation is modeled by the flux difference splitting technique. Higher order accuracy in space is achieved by a linear reconstruction technique with a flux limiting technique incorporated to prevent oscillation in the high-pressure gradient regions. A linear Galerkin method is used to discretize the diffusion terms. In addition, a non-nested multi-grid iteration technique is used to increase the convergence rate. Finally, the steady state flying attitude of a slider subject to pre-applied suspension force and torques is obtained by a Quasi-Newton iteration method, and the results of this scheme are compared with two other schemes.