Laser Doppler interferometer for vibration of rotating curved surfaces

With the rapid advancement of today's ultra-high performance mechanical or mechatronic systems such as magnetic or optical disk drives, improving metrology capabilities to examine the performance characteristics of these systems are growing ever more important. The primary tested studied in this paper is an ultra-high precision ball-bearing spindle that possesses non-repeatable runout of less than 100 nm. The metrology tool adopted is a laser Doppler interferometer system that has Megahertz bandwidth and nanometer resolutions. Experimental data obtained clearly indicates that measuring vertical runout of a spindle motor is a straightforward process. However, a fundamental effect was identified, where the radial runout data was found to drift upward or downward with time, when using the laser Doppler system to measure the radial runout of ultra-high precision rotational systems whose surface profile is not flat. All of the underlying reasons that cause this undesirable effect were proposed and verified. Approaches that can be adopted to circumvent this apparent limitation on adopting the laser Doppler interferometer systems to measure rotational curved surface were implemented to further extend its application horizon. The experimental data realized and the application experience obtained were shown to further advance our measurement capabilities.