Settling control and performance of a dual-actuator system for hard disk drives

This paper presents a settling control of a dual-actuator system for hard disk drives. The dual-actuator system consists of a voice coil motor (VCM) as a first stage actuator and a push-pull-type piezo-electric transducer (PZT) as a second-stage actuator. The settling controller is designed in three steps. In the first step, the VCM controller is designed so that the VCM feedback loop has basic performance and appropriate stability. In the second step, the PZT controller and a decoupling filter are designed in order to achieve superior performance of the dual-actuator system. The decoupling filter, which is placed between the PZT controller output and the VCM controller input, is a PZT output estimator so that the PZT actuator output is canceled at the VCM controller input. In the third step, the reference trajectory is designed for fast and smooth settling. In this study, the closed-loop sensitivity function is used as a performance index, and the gain and phase margins of the open-loop characteristic are used as stability measures. Experimental results show that the dual actuator system with the proposed settling controller achieves better performance than a single actuator system with the same VCM and a conventional settling controller.