Tom Karis Email & Phone Number

San Francisco Bay Area

United States

Temporary contracting in my areas of expertise. Recently completed a two week assignment with Western Digital Corp. in San Jose, CA.

Silicon Valley

My consulting business aims to leverage my skills and experience by working with R&D teams in high tech manufacturing industry.Some of my areas of expertise are: Nanotechnology,polymer materials development, polymer characterization, surface chemistry and engineering,colloid chemistry, particle suspension formulation and characterization,lubricant and.

San Jose, CA

• Collaborated between the drive engineering department and media development to improve the understanding of media processing and solve recurrent problems that frequently delayed new drive product programs or caused.
• Discovered that the correlation between lubricant thickness modulations and disk long waviness arises from metal alloy disk substrate polishing. The waviness was mostly eliminated thus avoiding the lubricant modulation.
• Invented a low-cost method for chemical passivation treatment of thin film magnetic recording disks to prevent hydrocarbon and water adsorption that causes head smears. This prevents data errors and warranty field.
• Cultivated skills: Lab Automation with Labview, Data analysis with Matlab, Structural and flow modeling with ANSYS Structural and Fluent. Team player, technical writing.

San Jose, CA

• My research focused on new technologies to improve disk manufacturing yield and drive motor reliability.
• Invented, synthesized, and characterized new electronic hopping charge control agents for fluid bearing spindle motors to prevent a nearly 600 mV drift in the motor voltage during operation due to thermal aging of the.
• Discovered that ozone treatment during vent up after sputter rapidly stabilized the oxidation state of the carbon overcoat which improved the disk manufacturing yield eliminating the need for a 12-hour time delay in.
• Developed and optimized the elastic properties of an injection molded thermoplastic elastomer polishing pad for magnetic recording disks, improving manufacturing yield by 5% ( US 8,192,249)
• Cultivated skills: ESI Corp. CFD (computational fluid dynamics), Lab Automation with Labview, carbon overcoat surface engineering, surface chemistry. Team player, technical writing.

San Jose, CA

• Rheology of liquid crystal polymers, electrophotographic toners, disk lubricants, and greases, a new rheomagnetic method for magnetic tape and disk particle dispersion quality measurement, motor bearing and magnetic.
• Thermodynamic model linking oil molecular structure, viscosity, and vapor pressure (Trib. Trans., 43(4)758-766(2000)). The base oil structure with the lowest combination of vapor pressure and viscosity is now used in.
• Chemical kinetic model for oil formulation design. Model-based testing decreased the test time from 5 years to one year. Enabled the first server class disk drives to operate at 10krpm with steel ball bearing spindle.

Doctor Of Philosophy (Phd), Chemical Engineering

Master Of Science (Ms), Chemical Engineering

Bachelor'S Degree, Electrical And Electronics Engineering