Dynamics of the oil-air interface in hard disk drive bearings

We study the dynamics of the oil-air interface (OAI) (also called meniscus) of the fluid dynamic bearings of hard disk drives, particularly when the OAI is located among bearing grooves. We derive a simple analytical expression for the evolution of the OAI of an herringbone-type journal bearing. We also report numerical experiments where we include surface tension as a regularization parameter.