Design and analysis of a high bandwidth disk drive servo system using an instrumented suspension

Resonance modes in the suspension of hard disk drives limit the closed-loop bandwidth. The bandwidth of the servo can be increased by active vibration control of the resonance modes. This paper considers the optimal placement of strain gauge sensors on a suspension to observe the vibration states of the suspension. Using a finite-element simulation of an actual suspension, a state-space model is identified for the two normal strains and the shear strain at each finite element. The state-space model includes the dynamics of the three primary resonance modes. A numerical search algorithm is used to determine the sensor location and orientation which maximizes the minimum singular value of the observability grammian. With the strain gauge output signal, a multirate inner loop controller is designed to be used with the existing head-positioning system. Simulations and analysis results suggest that use of an instrumented suspension is a viable candidate method for improved disk drive servo performance.