KARS’ ADVANCED MATERIALS, INC. is a minority owned small business that was started in Southern California in 1986 to offer industry complete analytical services related to characterization of advanced materials. Kars’ consists of a group of professional engineers with advanced degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Bombay) UC Berkeley, USC, UCSD, UC Irvine, and CSU Long Beach. The personnel at Kars’ have over three decades of experience in characterizing engineering materials including metals, rubbers, fibers (glass and carbon), ceramics, polymers, metal matrix composites and polymer matrix composites. KARS’ has a complete in-house materials characterization laboratory with state of the art equipment. Material characterization equipment ranges from optical and scanning electron microscopy for surface analysis to material fingerprinting of organic (FTIR) and metallic materials (EDS). Mechanical testing includes hardness testing of metallics (Rockwell, Brinell, Knoop, Vickers) as well as shore durometry for plastics. KARS’ now has the ability to test a variety of materials (in accordance with specific ASTM standards) utilizing their 100 kN load frame from United Calibration Corporation. The engineers at KARS’ can also aid in the development of non-standard test methods of consumer products, as well as perform stress analysis via finite element modeling.