Wear Characteristics of Padded Air Bearing Sliders During a Contact Take-Off Process

The pressing and challenging demand for resolving the stiction/glide-height conflict, driven by today’s ever decreasing head/disk spacing, forces us to constantly search for new technologies. One of them is padding the slider’s air bearing surface. Although the padded air bearing sliders can significantly reduce the stiction, the wear of these landing pads becomes a central issue. This paper attempts to analytically predict the wear characteristics of the landing pads during a contact take-off process. A wear factor derived from the adhesive wear law is employed to measure the wear extent of the landing pads. The contact force profile and wear factor of each pad are calculated through the partial contact air bearing simulation of a slider’s take-off process. It is found that the rear pad wears an order magnitude more than the leading pads. The wear volume of the rear pad increases exponentially with pad height, interface roughness and altitude. Raising the leading pads alone slightly reduces the wear of the rear pad. Placing the rear pad away from the slider’s trailing edge, however, substantially alleviates the wear of the rear pad. Finally, a lightly textured pad/disk interface decreases the pads’ wear to a minimum value for a given padded air bearing design. [S0742-4787(00)01903-2]