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High Temperature Mechanics, Friction, Wear and Adhesion of Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording

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Abstract

The majority of data generated today is stored in magnetic storage hard disk drives (HDD) of enterprise-level data centers. The HDD industry is striving for higher areal density capacity to meet increasing demand for data storage. Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) has been proposed as the next-generation technology that will bring revolutionary areal density gains. However, the technology comes with elevated temperature conditions and inevitably brings corresponding challenges to the head–disk interface (HDI). HDI high temperature tribology is the primary failure mode of HDDs and is discussed in the present work. Temperature dependence of mechanical properties, friction, wear and adhesion are reported based on experimental results from nanoindentation, nanoscratch, nanowear and adhesion experiments. The data reveals quantitative variations of Young’s modulus, hardness, coefficient of friction, and surface energy with temperature. In addition, XPS analysis is performed to measure chemical surface changes, and correlated with the nanomechanical findings.

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Acknowledgements

The motivation of this work was through a Sponsored Research Program from Seagate Technology LLC, through Grant No. SRA-32724. The TEM image was measured by Dr. X. Zhang, Texas A&M University (now at Purdue University). The XPS analysis was contributed by Dr. K. Polychronopoulou, Khalifa University, while on visit at Texas A&M.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843, USA

    Youfeng Zhang & Andreas A. Polycarpou

  2. Seagate Technology LLC, 47488 Kato Road, Fremont, CA, 94538, USA

    Huan Tang

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  1. Youfeng Zhang
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  3. Andreas A. Polycarpou
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Correspondence to Andreas A. Polycarpou.

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Zhang, Y., Tang, H. & Polycarpou, A.A. High Temperature Mechanics, Friction, Wear and Adhesion of Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording. Tribol Lett 68, 109 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11249-020-01348-z

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