A system of numerical flow simulation with an automated mesh generator and parallelized solver was developed and applied to the flow-field inside an optical disc drive. In this simulation system, a uniformly spaced Cartesian grid is used to reduce time and automatically generate a mesh from CAD data for complicated geometries, such as optical disc drives. The simulation results of optical disc drives are validated by particle image velocimetry (PIV) and pressure-distribution measurements. The measured velocity distributions above a rotating disc and around a pick-up unit show quantitative agreement with the simulated distributions. For the pressure distributions on a top case of an optical disc drive, although there is an error of 10Pa between simulated and measured results, the position of the peaks and distribution of pressure show good agreement. Comparing both sets of measurements, the simulation results in a Cartesian grid system are sufficiently accurate to enable the flow-field to be quantitatively assessed.
