Disk burnishing for head wear reduction

Abstract

Disk burnishing has been incorporated as a final process of disk surface finishing for reducing asperity height. We considered that disk burnishing must also reduce head wear. Conventionally, there have been two burnishing techniques, "Head Burnishing" (HB) and "Tape Burnishing" (TB). We proposed a burnishing technique, "Contact Burnishing" (CB) that used hard spherical sliders. In this paper, we show the effects of CB and TB on reducing head wear and close with the future direction for disk burnishing study. We compared pin wear on disk surfaces with and without CB and TB. Pin wear was reduced by both techniques. However, the wear rate decrease by them was not enough to realize zero wear. We consider TB and CB should be studied further to increase the asperity height reduction efficiency while maintaining disk surface quality.