Niraj Merchant Email & Phone Number

South San Francisco, California, United States

Responsible for validating Zipline’s drone docking capabilities by building automated testers, running validation testing and building software infrastructure for our validation campaigns.- Hired a team of 12 mechanical engineers, software engineers and test technicians to validate the Ground Systems on Zipline’s Platform 2 drone delivery platform..

South San Francisco, California, United States

- Validated dock geometry through iterative testing by designing a dock - drone interface and flight testing. Conducted 10+ iterations of geometry and 100+ flight tests to narrow down design and de-risk architecture.- Validated Platform 1 Launcher V3 by running 150k cycles of the launcher system in a temperature controlled container. Designed the.

Fremont, California, United States

Led a team of 2 engineers responsible for designing and building manufacturing equipment for Solar Roof. Our responsibilities included ramping manufacturing, speeding up roof installs and automating roof inspections.- Designed a manufacturing-friendly junction box, allowing labor and BOM annualized savings of $10M.Removed the need of a visual inspection.

Fremont, California, United States

- Worked with an external vendor to design and commission a 5 robot cell to manage adhesive dispense, press, plasma clean, flux dispense and a cure buffer - link- Scaled solar roof production by 50x over a short 9 month period by designing, building, commissioning and qualifying equipment for 7 processes on 3 different lines- Ramped up solar roof.

Santa Clara, CA

• Led a team to develop a unique method to calibrate multi-zone heaters using pyrometry (Patent Pending)– Designed the assembly of 30+ components using NX (Unigraphics) and validated designs using ther-mal modeling.– Cut.
• Developed a new plasma chamber to enable a pre-clean process– Led the qualification of the new chamber, driving more than $10M of new orders.– Worked with suppliers in order to optimize parts for cost and.
• Designed the next generation Lamp Based Anneals Tool– Boosted power availability by 4X– Used CFD modeling to improve cooling efficiency by optimizing the cooling channels – Validated the robustness of the design using.

Chino, CA

• Tested to support calibration of upcoming models of Hyundai and Kia cars in the USA.
• Developed a MATLAB program which cut processing time from hours to minutes.
• Helped Organize a customer clinic to compare consumer response between two variations of Idle Stop and Go systems

Bengaluru Area, India

• Developed a kinematic model of a flywheel governor for a diesel engine in MATLAB. Did feasibilitystudy to determine whether the precision of this governor fitted the spec for a diesel genset.
• The code was presented in the Mathworks User Conference, Bangalore, 2010
• Created a model to determine heat flow past a fuel injector

Bachelor'S Degree, Mechanical Engineering

Bachelor'S Degree, Materials Science

High School Diploma

High School Diploma