Pressure-sensitive paint measurement on co-rotating disks

There appears fluttering phenomena in a hard disk drive system with high-speed disks rotating inside a closed space, leading to degrade of reading and writing performance. The precise pressure distribution on the disk may improve the performance, but there has been no report because it is very hard to measure the surface pressure using conventional techniques, such as pressure taps. While pressure sensitive paint (PSP) seems to be suitable for the pressure measurement on the disk, we have to compensate its highly temperature-sensitive characteristics of PSP, because the temperature distribution on the disk is not assumed to be uniform. We employed PySO₃H based PSP, which has small temperature sensitivity, and have obtained the pressure distribution on the disk rotated at various speeds (10000-20000 rpm) successfully. The result showed that the pressure is higher at the disk outside than at the center, and forms a concentric circle distribution. Moreover, we found that the pressure difference between the inner and outer region of the disk increases as a square of disk rotation speed.