Optimizations of air-lubricated slider bearings using the reduced-basis concept

This paper presents an approach to achieve an optimal air bearing surface (ABS) design by using the reduced-basis concept that can effectively reduce the number of design variables. A multicriteria optimization problem is formulated to meet both the desired flying characteristics over the entire recording band and the fast takeoff performance at the landing zone. The optimal solutions of the sliders, whose target flying heights are 12 and 9 nm, are obtained. Due to its efficiency, our proposed method achieves the optimum solution with less than one-tenth of the effort for the conventional optimization method.