Abstract
Small oil particles generated from lubricant of rolling bearings in HDD sometimes cause such a fatal problem as disk crash. Therefore, a labyrinth seal is often used in HDD in order to prevent oil particles from scattering on the disk surface. In this paper, the seal performance of small oil particles of an annular labyrinth seal is investigated, numerically and experimentally. It was consequently found that the annular labyrinth seal is very effective in sealing small oil particles of more than 0.3 μm diameter.
