Rahul Rai, Ph.D. Email & Phone Number

Washington, Dc, Us

San Jose, California, United States

Responsible for providing technical support for storage product lines, facilitating communication between customers and internal teams, and ensuring product quality through troubleshooting and analysis.- Product Qualification: Collaborated with cloud customers and internal Toshiba teams to develop qualification plans, address technical issues, and monitor customer requirements.- Health Monitoring: Engineered a data pipeline to download, parse, store, and analyze the customer-provided performance logs, enhancing predictive capabilities for in-field HDD health.- Cross-Team Communication: Ensure clear communication of technical and quality-related issues between cloud customers in the USA and Toshiba teams in Japan.

San Jose, California, United States

Leading a worldwide cross-functional team responsible for developing, integrating, and qualifying new products to meet the performance and reliability targets for the new generation of enterprise-class cloud storage.- Product Development: Designed and successfully executed qualification plans for multiple product design life cycles, including test planning, data mining, failure analysis, risk mitigation, and knowledge transfer to factories.- Process Improvement: Optimized the in-drive calibration process for the new archive storage product to deliver a 4x reduction in manufacturing time and a 2x lifetime increase, resulting in an overall 3x reduction in TCO.- Lifetime Demonstration: Conducting the Weibull analysis to demonstrate the effectiveness of newly developed firmware features to improve the robustness of ultra-low clearance mechanical interface for new HDD products. - Risk Mitigation: Identification of fundamental failure modes in a dual actuator HDD (2x IOPS for cloud storage) and development of de-coupling techniques to mitigate its adverse effect on HDD robustness.- Prototype Assessment: Design of experiments for the early identification of the failure modes associated with the new sub-1-nanometer thin interface and follow-up root cause analysis to isolate corresponding KPIVs.

San Jose, California, United States

Spearheaded the worldwide inter-disciplinary team responsible for developing and qualifying new algorithms to accurately set the sub-nanometer head-disk clearance during production and maintain it during field operations. - Test Planning: Development of test plans for qualifying new technology (e.g., thin film lubricants, protective overcoats) that include identifying key deliverables, resource allotment, and scheduling using Gantt charts.- Cost Reduction: Adaptation of temperature sensitivity calibration process for the low-cost testing racks with minimal cooling capabilities that resulted in an annual savings of $25M/year in operating cost.- Field Mitigation: Developed a methodology to detect in-filed degradation of the mechanical interface using background measurements and an ML-based correction scheme to maintain the overall system's reliability

Shakopee, Minnesota

Member of core engineering team responsible for the development of Heat (Laser) Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology, which enables the high areal density roadmap for the next generation of enterprise HDDs.- Component Qualification: Evaluation of the thermo-mechanical performance for various competing head-embedded laser delivery systems and providing feedback to the head design team.- Lifetime Analysis: Accelerated life testing for HAMR drives in various inert gaseous mixtures and Weibull analysis to quantify potential reliability improvement due to environmental conditions.

Shakopee, Mn

Demonstration of the new technological advancements on the prototypes HDD units and design of innovative experiments to validate the reliability benefits for the performance class enterprise hard disk drives.- Reliability Demonstration: Integration and qualification of pressure sensor technology for enterprise class HDDs to mitigate the effect of lower air density at high altitude for energy efficient data centers.- Algorithm Development: Invention of a novel technique to detect contact between a head and a spinning disk using the heat transfer principle for ultra-low clearance interface with minimal mechanical modulations.

Developed a numerical model to study the effect of disk drive structural design on the stability of air bearing established between the head-disk interface during a dynamic event like operational shock. The simulation software developed was commercially released as a design tool for the HDD industry.• Developed a detailed hard drive model that accurately captures the behavior of nano-scale air bearing by coupling the suspension mounted slider with the spinning disk supported on fluid dynamic bearing.• Studied the effect of shock orientation and its duration on the HDD failure mechanism and evaluated the effect of disk supporting structure flexibility on the shock resistance for a given air bearing design.• Extended the HDD model to capture the response for a non-axial excitation that delivered the capability to study the effect of vibrations due to laptop speaker on the on the HDD performance.• Integrated the new operational shock model with the air bearing design tool (CMLAir v6) and commercially released the modeling software for HDD design teams.

• Evaluation of different dwell and sweep algorithms to gage their capabilities in reducing the contamination accumulated on the recording head during field operations.• Improvement in efficiency and accuracy of optical assessment of contaminated disk by developing a MATLAB based image processing tool to automate the particle counting for a microscopic image

Development of Visual Basic based GUI tool for monitoring and analyzing the HDD SMART logs to predict long term reliability for hard disk drives used in enterprise data warehouses.

Mumbai Area, India

Development a methodology for crack detection in pressurized pipes by monitoring the response from the embedded piezo-electric patches. Developed a numerical model to predict the effect of crack propagation on the piezo patch voltage located in the vicinity and validated the relationship by demonstration on a laboratory setup.• Developed a 3D finite element model for the pressurized pipe to evaluate the crack induced stress concentration and coupled its response using boundary element technique for the piezo patches.• Validated the numerical model by demonstrating the predicted relationship between crack depth and its location with voltage change on piezo patch by quasi-static load on three point bending setup.

Development of a parametric model for rubber body-mount to optimize its vibration isolation capabilities during off road driving conditions for a sport utility vehicle

Phd, Mechanical Engineering, 4.00

Ms, Mechanical Enginering, 4.00

M.Tech., Computer Aided Design And Automation, 9.51/10.00

Btech, Mechanical Engineering, 9.51/10.00

High School