The Numerical Analysis of Spindle Motor Bearing Composed of Herringbone Groove Journal and Spiral Groove Thrust Bearing

Ball bearings have been widely used for the spindle motor bearing in various kinds of information storage devices. Recently many researchers have been trying to replace ball bearings with fluid film bearings because of their superior NRRO(non-repeatable runout) characteristics. In this study, a numerical analysis has been conducted for the complicate bearing system composed of herringbone groove journal bearing and spiral groove thrust bearing for the spindle motor of the information storage device. At first, spindle motor bearing is modeled as journal bearing part and thrust bearing part separately, and then observed various influences of geometric parameters. Previous studies had considered only the translational motion of the journal bearing. However, this study takes the additional 2-degree of freedom rotation into consideration to attempt to describe the real motion of the spindle bearing. As a result, rotational stiffness coefficients and rotational damping coefficients are obtained. In addition, a spindle bearing system made up of four bearings is modeled and interpreted at once and coefficients of dynamic characteristics of each bearing are obtained. Finally, an eigen analysis of bearing system is made with these results. Through this analysis, it is possible to estimate an unstable condition of the system for given geometric parameters and to propose a method which is able to avoid the unstable condition by a proper adjustment of geometric parameters.