Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Vibrations, a TMC podcast. I'm your host, Daniel Litwin, the voice of B2B. 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 Bayat. He's president of Vibro Acoustic Consultants. And Mike Georgialis, he's North American sales manager with TMC. Now if you missed 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 Podcasts 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 gonna 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, cryo electron microscopy research? Give us your perspective. Yeah, TMC is company 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 going to listen and we've seen a lot of it before and we're going to 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 that 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, 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 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 going 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 want to talk to somebody that is going to do as much as they possibly can to come up with that design that's going to solve your problem. All right, 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 when we contrast, I mean, what Michael mentioned from the technology and product point of view, I do appreciate that because I remember working with TMC on just your rigid platform, and people don't realize that there's a lot of experience and lessons learned and analysis and background behind a technology. Something didn't just show up in one day. It takes years of learning and going back to the board and refining and so forth. So I was analyzing your rigid platform, the composite sections and all the glues and all components back then, twenty some years ago, and recognized the value of all of those because, 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, the scientists, even the engineers, mechanical and so forth. But I try to unravel that a little bit, bring it out of the mystery and make it more more understandable for everybody. And what that basically is that, obviously, when we talk about vibration, you're talking about waves traveling in material. And so there's an energy, we all understand earthquakes, earthquakes generate explosion at their fault and the waves get generated and those waves are traveling in the soil and then they come to the structures and shake the structure and interact and all that. It's very much similar thing. It's just we have a lot more than just one earthquake in our world where we have sources of shaking and generating those waves, and those waves are traveling in our soil from the surrounding environment 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 component to do an operation. So that is where things like that didn't happen at my end also overnight. In my past life, I was for eight years designing nuclear power plants 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, ASME, components, pumps and so forth, I started appreciating how all of those interactions happen. And when I moved into, about thirty years ago, into micro vibration world, it took me a while to adjust myself to these small scale movements. People talk about damping, people talk about isolation, people talk about all these different components of it, but globally to get a comprehension of this whole affair 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 took me about forty plus years to get where I am in appreciating this complexity. That's the very first thing. I always say that you need to understand a problem. That's half of your solution is how well you understand a problem. The other half is really bringing in the right solutions. And in this particular case, we are talking about solutions that we brought engineering design from facility structural 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 that 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 know, 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 a great question to segue 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 were donated a land right by the riverbed in the heart of Portland. And they basically, they had donated land and they collectively decided that they want to create a collaborative facility to house 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 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 railroad tracks, highways and then construction staging facility where they were operating heavy construction equipment that could last for twenty years, we were told. So basically, when I looked at and evaluated the environment, the environment came out as two thousand micro inches per second environment as is. So that's your starting point. 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 basically call transient, unstable. They come and go. 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 so you have this unstable and transient background on top of a steady state two thousand microinches per second. And my challenge was to bring this environment to fifty microinches per second. That was the criteria for the cancer research lab to operate at. So you could see that 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 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 backward. So on paper, you want to say that this is impossible to do. Basically, you can't get that noisy side and make it this quiet. It just can't happen. I have this thing that I always have learned in my professional career that I say that in engineering world, you never say never. 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 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 the second recognition was that, Oh, we have an amazing opportunity here to bring in TMC active cancellation system and place the tools on top of that. And that did two things for me. Not only brought the two hundred below fifty micron per second, but I think I always try to emphasize this, which is very important. Those transient spikes that happen in an environment that is unstable, which is our case, there is no easy way structurally to solve those. You cannot get a structure to react to a transient. Transient comes, it just passes through. But an active system can create that cancellation and additional stability that's needed. Because imagine that tool, that cryo TEM 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 to be tainted or contaminated by a transient activity. And so to me, what TMC 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 in foundation and the structural system. Well, Aman, thanks for teeing us up on the actual research there and the case study for today. We're going to dig deeper here. Now, so again, Cancer Research Lab, both of your companies worked on this. And as we dig deeper, I want to make sure folks also know that we have a 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 white papers on the cancer research lab, but probably easiest way will be click on the link below. So again, new lab 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 a rather challenging microvibration 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 this, yeah, again, I mentioned something on any challenging problem, at least in my experience, it's become my motto that 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 being a site at riverbed, basically soil side of it is really where 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 we had to come up for this. And so 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 topsoil. So there's a thirty foot of that sitting on literally an eighty foot or so of jelly, really soft mud, and then below that, about one 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. But when you go deeper, there is basically a really good soil. So we basically experimented by asking 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 one 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 a situation where you isolated from that 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 recognized 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 microinch per second down to two hundred. And, you know, this is a counterintuitive. Usually, I do not like to introduce islands, but it basically was a concept of what if I create a lab that is an island, completely isolated from this soil, surrounding soil, and supported by that one hundred feet good soil below, I do gain a factor of ten, and literally that's the concept that ended up implemented. So we literally had to dig a trench eighteen inches wide all around this lab floor and put our lab floor, which was about ten million pounds of soil, on top of about fifty seven columns, I think, or I'm sorry, piles, all directly attached to that one hundred feet deep soil. And this concept of island was created, and we'll dig into a little bit more there because it does when you create that sort of situation, you create additional dynamic complications that did happen for this. Imagine you have even you have fifty seven piles supporting ten million pounds of soil at one hundred feet tall. It is like similar to a light pole where you could look at a light pole that is just completely vibrating. I created basically a resonator that I didn't want to, but I had no choice. And so we had to go that way and stabilize it and then bring in TMC to take us from that lab floor of two hundred down to below fifty. And the solution worked. The facility is operating successfully and we are very proud of it because it is one of a kind way to do. We don't usually go that route, but this was the only opportunity to solve this problem in this project. Yeah, I really enjoyed working on this white paper and learning a little bit more about the building design that Ahmad's company and Ahmad came up with because it really is a unique building. And when you translate that and what the challenge Ahmad was working with, when you think about from a world of vibration, we like to break things down into springs. 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 introduce all this vibration. Then you had another eighty feet of soil, that was another spring. So you had 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 from 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 design 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, brought in TMC, we got them the rest of the way. And so it became something that's a very, very interesting and unique design in a very, very bad environment. So I think a lot of interesting innovations were involved in the solution and the building of this building. And with that, we're gonna go ahead and wrap up part two of this three parter. We do have one more episode with Ahmad 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 between 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 techmfg dot com and make sure that you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts and Spotify so you're fully tapped 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.
