SOLUTION OF THE RAREFIED-GAS LUBRICATION EQUATION USING AN ADDITIVE CORRECTION BASED MULTIGRID CONTROL-VOLUME METHOD

The ever shortening product cycle for magnetic recording disk drives d emands a fast and accurate numerical prediction of the slider's frying characteristics during the design stage. A computationally efficient multigrid control volume method is developed in this paper or the solu tion of the very high bearing number and shaped rail air bearing probl ems, The control volume schemes for discretizing the Reynolds lubricat ion equation are based olt various convection-diffusion formulations,, chile the solution of the resulting discretization equations is accele rated by an additive correction based multigrid method. A comparison s tudy using the 50 percent tripad and Headway AAB sliders demonstrates a significant improvement in the solver's performance as compared to t he single-grid method.