Experimental Investigation of Air-Breathing Mechanism to Enhance Proximity between Traveling Tape and a Guider

Abstract

A modern high-density magnetic tape drive is an ideal solution for archival storage in terms of its storage capacity and reliability among other available data storage products such as hard disk drives and optical drives. Following similar trend as hard disk drives, tracking density for modern tape drives is projected to be doubled every five years. For higher recording density, thinner magnetic tape is desirable. Since flanged rollers are currently widely used in modern tape drive to reduce tape lateral motion, reducing thickness of the tape can significantly decrease its stiffness and increase like-hood of damaging tape edges by adjacent mechanical components in a tape drive as well as in manufacturing, shipping and handling processes. To avoid this, alternative tape guiding and actuation method are required. Among all methods, good contact between tape and actuator is required for local motion generation. In this paper a novel air-breathing mechanism in an ultrasonic plate-like actuator to actively guide the tape is proposed and validated through experiments. Significant enhancement of surface contact between traveling tape and guider is demonstrated. A perfect parallel contact can be easily reached by the proposed method. It is found that pattern of air-breathing holes plays significant role in reducing proximity between traveling tape and guider plate which has implications in actuator vibration for local motion and assembly tolerance designs.

Keywords

• high-density magnetic tape drive
• air-breathing mechanism
• ultrasonic actuator
• pzt based actuator
• lateral tape motion (ltm).