Ball swaging is a general method in head stack assembly process to permanently attach Head Gimbal Assemblies (HGA) on the actuator arm. In this process, the swage ball is guided by a pin through the inner base plate’s hole in order to deform the base plate to tightly attach to the actuator arm. However, the loosing problem can still be found quite often in the current swaging process. This research focuses on ball sizes and the number of balls used which currently no theoretical guidance in choosing the both parameters. Besides, the best combination of the both parameters can give the best swaging performance. The three-dimensional finite element model is created and analyzed to estimate the swaging performance according to the variation of both parameters by using the tightening torque and the fixing distance of base plate to determine the quality of the ball swaging process. The results from finite element method are treated as the sampling points which are used to create the interpolation in order to increase the considered cases to cover all happening cases from both parameters. After that, a searching algorithm is implemented to determine the most suitable ball size and the number of ball used for the process. By using the finite element analysis together with the interpolation and a searching algorithm, the optimal design parameters for a complex problem with multiple conditions of consideration can be easily found.
The process of finite element analysis that deals with large deformation often produces distorted elements in the later stages of the analysis. These distorted elements lead to analysis problems, such as inaccurate solutions, slow convergence, and premature termination of the analysis. This paper proposes a new mesh generation algorithm to mesh the input part for pure Lagrangian analysis, where our goal is to improve the shape quality of the elements along the analysis process to reduce the number of inverted elements at the later stage, and to decrease the possibility of premature termination of the analysis. One pre-analysis is required to collect geometric and stress information in the analysis. The proposed method then uses the deformed-shape boundary known from the pre-analysis, finds the optimal node locations, considers the stress information to control the mesh sizes, as well as control the mesh directionality, generates meshes on the deformed boundary, and finally, maps the elements back to the undeformed boundary using inverse bilinear mapping. The proposed method has been tested on two forging example problems. The results indicate that the method can improve the shape quality of the elements at the later stage of the analysis, and consequently extend the life of the analysis, thereby reducing the chance of premature analysis termination.
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