Optimization of passive control performance for different hard disk drives subjected to shock excitation

Laptop personal computers (LPCs) and their components are vulnerable devices in harsh mechanical environments. One of the most sensitive components of LPCs is hard disk drive (HDD) which needs to be protected against damages attributable to shock and vibration in order to have better magnetic read/write performance. In the present work, a LPC and its HDD are modeled as two degrees of freedom system and the nonlinear optimization method is employed to perform a passive control through minimizing peak of HDD absolute acceleration caused by a base shock excitation. The presented shock excitation is considered as half-sine pulse of acceleration. In addition, eleven inequality constraints are defined based on geometrical limitations and allowable intervals of lumped modal parameters. The target of the optimization is to reach optimum modal parameters of rubber mounts and rubber feet as design variables and subsequently propose new characteristics of rubber mounts and rubber feet to be manufactured for the HDD protection against shock excitation. The genetic algorithm and the modified constrained steepest descent algorithm are employed in order to solve the nonlinear optimization problem for three widely-used commercial cases of HDD. Finally, the results of both optimization methods are compared to make sure about their accuracy.