Fretting Wear Simulation of the Dimple/Gimbal Interface

A 3-D finite-element model is used to calculate fretting wear of the dimple gimbal interface in a hard disk drive. A local wear equation based on Archard's wear law is used to calculate wear of the dimple and the depth of the wear track on the gimbal. An “adaptive cycle jump method” is implemented to reduce the calculation time. A good correlation between numerical results and experimental measurements is observed.