Published papers

As one of the important aerodynamic problems of magnetic disk drives for microcomputers, a flow between shrouded corotating disks and its instability have been investigated. The four-decker circular disk pack is enclosed in a cylindrical container to endure the axial symmetry. Mean and fluctuating velocity fields induced by the disk rotation has been obtained by employing fine scale multi-sensor hot-wire probes. First, the velocity distributions of 2D axisymmetric base flow field are reported. The occurrence of 3D non-axisymmetric flow will then be discussed, where the rotational speed as well as the number of cells will be discussed and compared with the existing data.

This paper focuses on the interaction between the flow unsteadiness and disk vibration of shrouded corotating disk system to identify the nature of the flow-induced vibration of disks in the wide range of rotation speed below critical. Special attention is paid to the role of the vortical flow structure on the disk vibration and vice versa. The water test rig for optical measurement and the air test rig for hot-wire and vibration measurements are employed, both being axisymmetric models of 3.5 in. hard disk drive. Before investigating fluid-solid interaction, the velocity and vorticity fields between disks are examined by employing a particle image velocimetry, in order to check the flow within our own apparatus to have the same characteristics as those commonly accepted. In the course of this preliminary experiment, it is found that "vortical structures" reported in the previous papers based on the flow visualization are actually "vortices" in the sense that it exhibits closed streamlines with concentrated vorticity at its center when seen from an observer rotating with the structure itself. The measurements of out-of-plane displacement of the disk employing different disk materials reveal that disk vibration begins to occur even in low subcritical speed range, and amplitude of nonrepeatable run out (NRRO) can be uniquely correlated by using the ratio between the rotating speed and the critical speed. The power spectral densities of disk vibration showed that the disk vibrates as a free vibration triggered by, but not forced by, the flow unsteadiness even in the high subcritical speed range. The disk vibration has negligible effect on the vortical flow structure suggesting the soundness of the rigid disk assumption employed in the existing CFD. However, RRO has significant influence on the flow unsteadiness even if the disks are carefully manufactured and assembled. Since the RRO is unavoidable in the real disk system, the flat disk assumption should be considered more carefully. Copyright © 2007 by ASME.

The vortex method is applied to the calculation of a homogeneous shear turbulence, and compared with a finite difference code using identical calculation conditions. The core spreading method with spatial adaptation is selected as the viscous diffusion scheme of the vortex method. The shear rate is chosen so that it matches the maximum value observed in a fully developed channel flow. The isosurface, anisotropy tensors, and joint probability density functions reflect the ability of the present vortex method to quantitatively reproduce the anisotropic nature of strongly sheared turbulence, both instantaneously and statistically. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Analogous to an algebraic Reynolds stress model, the algebraic heat flux model (AHFM) is derived from a second-moment closure by invoking the weak-equilibrium condition. The present study investigates this condition in detail as it applies to the advection and diffusive-transport terms. For the advection term, the correct form of this condition in non-inertial frames is obtained by means of an invariant Euclidean transformation. The validity of the diffusive-transport condition is examined through an a priori test using a DNS database for rotating turbulent channel flow with heat transfer. It is shown that the weak-equilibrium condition applied to diffusive-transport term tends to fail in the near-wall region. An alternative form is proposed that is based on an asymptotic analysis of the transport equation budget in the near wall region. An evaluation of proposed form shows that it has the potential to improve the predictive ability of an ARSM for flows involving system rotation and/or streamline curvature.