Air-bearing design based on global approximation concepts

The purpose of this study is to automatically design the air-bearing surface shape to meet all desired flying performances using global approximation concepts. The reduced basis concept is used to reduce the number of design variables. The progressive quadratic response surface modeling is used to handle the nonsmooth and discontinuous cost and constraint functions. A multicriteria optimization problem is formulated to enhance the flying performance over the entire recording band during the steady-state and track-seek operations as well as the fast takeoff performance. Optimum solutions for the three target flying heights with four basis models are successfully obtained.