Prediction of Head Stack Assembly Gram Load Using Finite Element Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a finite element model for simulating a swaging process of a hard disk drive(HDD) head stack assembly (HSA). The swaging process is a material processing technique using swageballs to connect a suspension system to an E-block which becomes the so-called head stack assembly.The finite element (FE) model is three-dimensional using an explicit dynamics simulation with solid Lagrangianelements. In this paper, the base plate and arm tip deformations due to ball swaging and the impact of thehead stack gram load value are evaluated. The simulation results are compared to those obtained fromexperimentation. It was found that the results from FE analysis are well-corresponding to the experimentresults.