Resonance vibration analysis in double acting arm using FEM with PSO based non-uniform refinement

Abstract

This paper proposes a new technique to analyze the resonance vibration problem, which is a major problem in Hard Disk Drive Arm (HDD arm), by using a multi-grid, Finite Element Analysis (FEA) with PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) based non-uniform refinement level of mesh partitioning. Summation of error between the measured values of resonance frequencies from Laser Doppler Vibrometer (LDV) and the simulated values from the developed FEM program is formulated as the objective function in the optimization problem. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is adopted to find the optimal characteristic lengths to achieve both fast simulation time and acceptable accuracy of the result. The proposed technique can reduce the computational time in the analysis and is adopted to study the behavior of resonance vibration affected by the epoxy thickness. The results show that the developed program can effectively simulate the resonance behavior in HDD arm. In addition, the computational results by the proposed method are obtained faster than those by the uniform refinement level method while the accuracy of results by both methods is almost the same. © 2012 ICIC International.