Engineering Innovations Tackle Noise and Vibration Challenges for New Cancer Research Center

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Vibrations, a TMC podcast. I'm your host Daniel Littwin, the voice of b to b, and folks thanks again for tuning in to some more thought leadership from the TMC team. If you're tapping into this episode, it's actually part two of a three part series with Ahmad Beyat. He's president of Viper Acoustic Consultants and Mike Georgales, he's North American sales manager with TMC. Now if you miss parts one of this three part conversation, then probably time to go check out part one first before you tap into the rest of the show. Now if you are all caught up, then perfect. Make sure that you're subscribed on Apple Podcast and Spotify for the final part of this as well. And head to tech m f g dot com for more supporting content. Now in our last episode, we laid the foundation for the challenges that our customers and their various industries face in isolating sources of vibration, and we also analyzed how it impacts their research heavy work. With today's episode, we're diving into the meat of the life sciences case study that we teased in the last episode. And we're also going to be getting some perspective on support roles that both TMC and VACC see themselves playing in reducing vibration and building noise for fine tuned research and mission critical industries. So let's go ahead and jump into part two with Mike and Ahmad without further ado. Now, what I wanna do is get Y'all's perspective on I guess how you each view your roles in supporting this industry. You already teased out, you know, some of the specific technologies, and tools that you offer and, again, our audience most likely is already familiar with these, at least at a base level, But I wanna hear from you, right, how you view your role. So we'll start with TMC. So Mike, how does TMC view its role in supporting the life sciences industry or more specifically, you know, cryo electron microscopy, research, give us your perspective. Yeah. TMC is a company that is a company of engineers. Everybody at TMC loves to solve problems and we're the kind of folks that like to work with our customers to understand their problems. And we view ourselves as Somebody the customer can come to with their challenging applications, and we're gonna listen, and we've seen a lot of it before, and we're gonna work with you to figure it out. Because I think one of the things that we do best is we manufacture in the United States and we have all of our engineering and sales and all of our activities will occur out of one headquarters building just north of Boston. And I think that positions us in a unique position to be able to react quickly to things that customers may need that may be that may be new, that may be unexpected, and we're able to create extremely complex and customized vibration control systems. So I think the industry views our role as part of this ecosystem as the guys that you come to when you've got a vibration problem and you need some sort of vibration mitigation system and you know what's gonna be a tough one to build. You know what's a challenging vibration problem. You know you need the best performance, and you know you wanna talk to somebody that is going to do as much as they possibly can to come up with that design that's gonna solve your problem. Alright. Now, I'm going to pose the same question to Ahmad. Ahmad, how do you see VACC playing an essential role? Or I guess, Let me rephrase that. How do you see VACC's role in supporting this industry? Right? What role do you think you play and why? Yeah. This is a very good question. And and when we contrast, I mean, what Michael mentioned from the technology and and product point of view. I do appreciate that because I remember working with TMC on just your your rigid platform, and people don't realize that there's a lot of experience and lessons learned and and analysis and background behind a technology. Something didn't just show up, you know, in one day. It it takes years of learning and going back to the board and refining and so forth. So I was analyzing your rigid platform actually composite sections and all the glues and all the all the components back then, you know, twenty some years ago and and recognized the value of all of those because, you know, Daniel, basically, a lot of times when we talk about vibration, it's a bit like a black box for a lot of the industry stakeholders, you know, the scientists, even the engineers, mechanical, and so forth. But I try to unravel that a little bit, you know, out of you know, bring it out of the mystery and make it more more time tangent, you know, more understandable for everybody. And and what that basically is that obviously, when we talk about vibration, you're talking about waves traveling in material. And and and and so, you know, you there's an energy, you know, we all understand earthquakes, you know, earthquake generate explosion at default in in the waves gets generated and those waves traveling soil, and then they come to the structures and shake the structure and interact and all that. It's very much similar thing is just we have a lot more than just one earthquake in our world, where we have sources of shaking and in generating those waves, and those waves are traveling in our soil from the surrounding environment and and our structures. And so there's a lot of interactions going on. And the resulting is now we are trying to protect a super sensitive. You know, component to do an operation. So so that is where you know, things like that didn't happen on at my end also overnight. In my past life, I I was for eight years designing nuclear power plants, and and then I appreciated a lot of these complex time histories and waveforms that were affecting some of the components within the reactor vessel, nozzles, or ASME, you know, components, pumps, and so forth. I started appreciating how all of those interactions happened. And when I moved into about thirty years ago into micro vibration world, it me a while to adjust myself to this small scale movements. People talk about damping, people talking about eye installation. People talk about all these different components or but but globally to get a comprehension of this whole fair, and and and try to put your arm. I always say as engineer, try to put your arm around the problem. Where you feel like you've covered the whole thing. There's no stone unturned. It's not that easy, and it doesn't happen overnight. So what I basically look at it is that my background really is all about dynamics structure. My master's thesis was soil, structure, dynamics, and interaction. So it it took me about forty plus years. To get where I am in in in in appreciating the this complexity. That's the very first thing I always say that you need to understand the problem. That's half of your solution is is how well you understand the problem. The other half is really bringing in the right solutions. And and and in this particular case, we are talking about solutions that we brought engineering design from facility structure foundation to a product that is technology based is an active isolator to create that solution at the end. So now let's unify these two perspectives, right? VACC brings a building level engineering approach TMC brings a more granular vibration cancellation and isolation technology. I know that's an oversimplification, but, you know, we'll just go with that. Right? Why is a joint solution needed in the first place? Right? Why doesn't either, like, totally encapsulate the one singular solution? And how do you see that joint collaboration, you're actually being beneficial for the client. If, you know, if so, I assume, yes, but, you know, I'll give you all the room to speak on it. Yeah. This is this is a great question to segway ourselves into this problem. Of the cancer research facility. So I can set the problem, you know, so that your audience would appreciate the challenge So three universities in Oregon, they they were donated a land right by the riverbed in in the Hearthub Portland, and and they basically they had a donated land, and they collectively decided that they want to create a collaborative, you know, facility to house a a a cancer research scientist and his team from Lawrence Livermore National Lab to this facility. And so they basically said we want to make this happen. So the the the the the the how the problem is set up here, that's very important for everybody to realize that When we looked at the site, this site basically was very noisy site. There were a lot of surrounding activities besides the the railroad tracks, highways, and and and then construction staging facility where they were do they were operating heavy construction equipment that could could last for twenty years, they we were told So, basically, when I looked at and evaluated the environment, the environment came out at as two thousand micro inches per second, environment as is. So that's your starting point. And and and and and on top of that, which was very important with all these activities, a lot of them, the nature of them are transient. What we what we basically call transient, unstable, they come and go. And and and so you could be there for two minutes and you see this spike that even takes your environment to five thousand or even higher. And and so you had this unstable and transient background on top of a steady state two thousand micro range per second. And and my challenge was to bring this as environment to fifty micro inches per second. That was the criteria for for the Cancer Research Lab to operate that. So you could see that there is a there is a factor of huge orders of magnitude for us to achieve. And usually usually, when we look at these sort of facilities, we want to have an environment that it starts with twenty, thirty micro inches per second so that I could build upon that with my facility sources and get fifty. So this is a completely back force. So so on paper, you wanna say that this is impossible to do. Basically, you can't get that noisy side and and make it this quiet. It just can't happen. You know, I I have this thing that I always have learned in my professional career that I say that in Indian world, there's no you never say never. There's for any challenging problem, there's always equal opportunity that you could recognize realize and take advantage of to solve the problem. And that's exactly what happened here where where when I inherited the problem, and I looked at it and there were opportunities on the structural foundation side that I could reduce that two thousand to perhaps something around two hundred, but basically that was it. Beyond that, I had no other external solution. To bring that vibration to fifty. And and the second recognition was that, oh, we have an amazing opportunity here to to bring in TMC active cancellation system and and and place the tools on top of that, and that need two things for me. Not only brought the two two hundred below fifty micron each per second, but I think I always try to emphasize this, which is very important. Those transient spikes that happen in in an environment that is unstable in which is our case, there is no easy way of structurally to solve those. You cannot get a structure to react to a transient transit comes, it just passes through. But an active system can create that cancellation and additional stability that's needed. Because imagine that tool, you know, that cryotem that is operating on top of the active it needs a stable environment. You cannot allow that, you know, they could be doing an experiment that it lasts milli or microsecond. So for them, that microsecond is the entire universe. And you cannot allow that microsecond second to be tainted or contaminated by by a transient activity And and so to me, what t m c brought to the table, it not only was taking that two hundred to below fifty, but also addressing that transient activity that there is really no easy solution, external, and and in the in the foundation and the structural system. Well, Oman, thanks for teeing us up on the actual research there and the case study for today. We're gonna dig deeper here. Now so again, Cancer Research Lab, both of your companies worked on this. And as we dig deeper, I wanna make sure folks also know that we have very complete and robust document that's gonna get a little more granular than we can get on a podcast today, and it's probably easier to digest some of that granular. You know, information and specifics of the project. So if you want some of that, we're gonna link it in the podcast description below. You can also go to our website, tech m f g dot com slash learning. You can find it there under our why papers on the cancer research lab, but probably easiest way will be click on the link below. So again, new labs set for construction on donated land, with these three universities and that surrounding industrial activity and just sort of general commotion in the surrounding environment posed rather challenging micro vibration problem to solve. So you began your research about the area, you know, around the construction site before you actually began, what would you say was the most difficult aspect to solve and why? And how did your research help inform the right solution? Right? I guess help connect the dots between the pre process and the actual process itself. Yeah. Yeah. And and this will yeah, again, if you yeah, I mentioned something on any challenging problem. At least in my experience, it's become my motto that there there are equal opportunities. It's just really for us to realize And so we basically actually had you know, once we looked at this problem and and and and and being a site at riverbed, Basically, soil side of it is really where it it it dawned on me on the solutions that is really in this facility is one of a kind in the world. To my knowledge, there is no such solution out there that, you know, we have to come up for this. And and and so so the the the the setting is that there is a thirty foot soil layer. Literally fill layer. Like, there are engine parts. Like, people just throw historically anything there to fill that that top soil. So there's a thirty foot of that sitting on a literally an eighty foot or so of jelly. Really soft, mud, and then below that, about hundred feet or so, we have really good soil. So think about it that it's a rough neighborhood in that thirty foot soil layer, and a lot of people like commotion is happening and creating all kinds of transient and steady vibration. And and and and but when you go deeper, there is basically a really good soil. So so we basically experimented you know, by asking the the the construction folks to drill two piles for us. One was a pile that was completely isolated from that thirty foot and going to deeper hundred feet soil. And embedded into that. And then another one was engaging that thirty foot soil. So we ran an experiment just to recognize that there is really an opportunity if you can create situation where you are not you are isolated from the thirty foot soil. And that is where this whole concept of what we did for this facility came up where, you know, based on that experimental study we did between the two piles, we recognize that we could potentially if we isolate our lab floor from that thirty foot soil layer, we could gain about a factor of ten. Bringing that two thousand micro range per second down to two hundred. And and and, you know, this is a counter intuitive. Usually, I do not I do not like to introduce islands, but it it basically was a concept of What if I create a lab that is an island? It's completely isolated from this soil, surrounding soil. Supported by that hundred feet good soil below, I do gain a factor of ten. And and and literally that's the concept that ended up implemented. So we literally had to dig a trench eighteen inch wide all around this left floor and and and put our left floor, which was about ten million pounds of soil. On top of about fifty seven columns, I think, or or I'm sorry piles all in, you know, directly attached to that hundred feet deep soil. And and and and and this concept of island was created, and we dig into a little bit more there because it does when you create that sort of situation, you create additional dynamic complications that do did happen for this. You know, imagine you have even you have fifty seven piles, supporting ten million pounds of soil you know, at hundred feet tall, it this likely is like similar to a light pole where you could look at a light pole that is just completely vibrating. You know, I created basically a resonator that I didn't want to, but I had I had no choice. And and so we had to go that way and stabilize it and then bring in TMC to take us from that loud floor of two hundred down to below fifty. And and and, you know, and and and the the the solution worked. The the the facilities are operating so successfully, and and we are very proud of it because it is one of a kind way to do. We we we don't usually go that route, but this was the only opportunity to solve this problem in this project. Yeah. I I really enjoyed working on this white paper and learning a little bit more about the building design that a mod company and mod came up with because it's it's really is a unique building, and when you translate that and what the challenge Amad was working with, when you think about from world of vibration, we like to break things down into sprints. And everything you put on something becomes a spring, everything you stack on something, becomes a spring, and you're building everything up as springs. So when you look at what Ahmad built, he had a layer of thirty foot soil and that's a giant springy spring that's just gonna general introduce all this vibration. Then you have another eighty feet of soil. That was another spring. So you have these two springy layers of soil on each other. And if you tried to build a building just on that, there's no possible way it would work. And another thing I learned was the influence of the water flowing, a lot of the vibration that it was measuring was just on the motion of the water of the river that was being absorbed in these two giant spongy springs. And that's what made it such a bad environment. So when Ahmad designed the pylon designed to create an island and go down to the good soil, he bypassed those two springs. He was able to get lower vibration, and then Of course, you know, brought in DMC, we got them the rest of the way. And so it it became something that that's a very very interesting and unique design in a very, very bad environment. So so I think that a lot a lot of interesting innovations were involved in the solution and the building of this this building. And with that, we're going to go ahead and wrap up part two of this three parter. We do have one more episode with Amad and Mike coming, where we'll wrap our conversation with some actionable vibration control strategies for our audience as well as put more of a focus on why collaboration companies like TMC and VACC elevate the quality of solutions that we can actually offer to our customers' industries. Till then, make sure that you're heading to our website, tech m f g dot com, and make sure that you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts and Spotify so you're fully tap into future episodes and caught up with previous conversations. I'm your host Daniel Litwin, the voice of B2B, and we'll catch you on the next episode of vibrations, a TMC podcast.