Title: Modelling of thermal characteristics of HDD using thermal and fluid iterative coupling method

Authors: Jia He Tan; Eddie Y.K. Ng; Cheng Peng Tan; N.Y. Liu

Addresses: School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, 639798, Singapore ' School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, 639798, Singapore ' Data Storage Institute, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, 5 Engineering Drive 1, 11760, Singapore ' Data Storage Institute, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, 5 Engineering Drive 1, 11760, Singapore

Abstract: This paper presents a thermal iterative coupled model using ANSYS APDL and FLUENT to determine the thermal characteristics in a 1.8 inch HDD operating in its 'reading' mode. The methodology undertaken in this project aims to allow effective information exchange between FLUENT and ANSYS APDL with the aid of an in-house developed code. Due to the ambiguity in determining the bulk fluid temperature, two different approaches were performed and the results were subsequently validated and compared. Both approaches proved to be highly accurate with the final temperature of the various internal solid surfaces to be within 3% of experimental results. In addition, the results were compared and proved to provide a much higher level of accuracy than a single ANSYS heat transfer model. All in all, the improved model can serve to help designers to critically evaluate the thermal conditions within the HDD and aid in the search of an optimised thermal management system in a HDD.

Keywords: coupled simulation; heat transfer; thermal characteristics; hard disk drives; HDDs; modelling; thermal iterative coupling; fluid iterative coupling; computational fluid dynamics; CFD; information exchange; FLUENT; ANSYS APDL; bulk fluid temperature; thermal management.

DOI: 10.1504/PCFD.2013.053639

Progress in Computational Fluid Dynamics, An International Journal, 2013 Vol.13 No.3/4, pp.238 - 243

Published online: 31 Oct 2013 *

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