Cheng C.

With the increased demands in performance, the optical disk drive needs to be high speed and more stable. A novel design of a vibration absorber used in reducing the vibration caused by the unbalance of an optical disk drive is proposed. When an optical disk is rotating, the vibration caused by the unbalance resulting from the non-homogeneous disk increases as the rotating speed increases. The proposed vibration absorber with a circular shape is installed below the optical disk and rotates with the optical disk. The objective is to use shape optimization technique to make the first radial natural frequency of the absorber coincides with the rotating speed of the optical disk in a specific rotational frequency range. Thus it can effectively suppress the vibration in the radial direction caused by the unbalance of the optical disk and acts as an auto-balancer when the optical disk drive operates in this frequency range. Results from numerical simulations using finite element method prove the feasibility and show that the unbalance of the optical disk can be reduced effectively.