Thousand-fold scale-up of the oil-air interface in fluid dynamic bearings of hard disk drives

The aim of the 1000x scale up experiment was to afford easy viewing of the capillary hydrodynamics of the oil-air interface (OAI). OAI dynamics of the actual 1000x scale-up conditions were computed using volume of fluid (VOF)-based numerical code. Result shows that at the design speed, and with the strongly stabilizing effect of gravity, no air ingestion occurred.