Free vibration analysis of PZT glide heads

This paper studies natural frequencies and mode shapes of a glide head with a piezoelectric transducer (PZT) through calibrated experiments and a fini te element analysis. In the experiments, the PZT transducer sewed as an act uator, exciting the slide head from 100 kHz to 1.3 MHz, and a laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV) measured displacement of the glide head at the inner or o uter rail. The natural frequencies were measured through PZT impedance and frequency response functions front PZT to LDV, In the finite element analys is, the glide head was meshed by brick elements. The finite element results show that there are two types of vibration modes: slider modes and PZT mod es, Only the slider modes are important to glide head applications. Moreove r, natural frequencies predicted from the finite element analysis agree wel l with the experimental results within 5% of error. Finally, the finite ele ment analysis identifies four critical slider dimensions whose tolerance wi ll significantly vary the natural frequencies: PZT bonding length, wing thi ckness, slider thickness, and air bearing recess depth.