CORRELATION BETWEEN CONTACT START STOP AND CONSTANT-SPEED DRAG TESTING IN MAGNETIC HEAD-DISK TRIBOLOGY

A model to establish the correlation between wear in constant speed drag testing and contact start/stop testing is developed. The model is based on the Archard wear equation and uses the quasi-steady Kita-Kogure-Mitsuya model for the transition of a slider from sliding to flying to calculate the velocity dependent contact force between the slider and disk during start/stop. Experimental results for the wear of a zirconia overcoated disk are obtained for both start/stop and constant speed drag testing as a function of the number of repeated cycles using optical profilometry. The correlation between predictions and experimental data shows good agreement for up to at least 10,000 cycles of sliding.