Development and optimal design of a HDD spindle motor with pulling magnet to reduce electrical loss

A conventional hard disk drive (HDD) spindle motor has a pulling plate to generate the axial magnetic force. However, the pulling plate consumes significant amount of iron loss due to the alternating magnetic field on the pulling plate. We propose the new design of a HDD spindle motor with pulling magnet to generate the pre-load as well as to eliminate the iron loss of the pulling plate. We also develop an optimal design methodology to minimize iron and copper losses from the spindle motor of a computer HDD while maintaining the same level of torque ripple and pulling force. The new design is optimized by the developed optimal design methodology. A metamodel is constructed from the three-dimensional finite element analysis of the magnetic field and the meta-modeling techniques, and the accuracies of the metamodels are discussed. The proposed optimal design problem is solved by the progressive quadratic approximation method. The proposed design reduces the electrical loss of the HDD spindle motor by 30.42 % while maintaining the same level of torque ripple and pulling force.This work was supported by a grant from the International Cooperation of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (No. 20102030200011), funded by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, Republic of Korea