Hey, everyone, it's Daniel Litwin, the voice of B to b, and you're about to dive into the first episode of TMCF podcast vibrations. It was initially filmed as a full conversation, but there was just so much content that we needed to cover. In this first episode, we decided to split it into three parts, so make sure that you watch and listen to all three parts. As we set the stage for our show and really lay out a foundation for what we're hoping to explore, why we see TMCF work is so critical for our industries, and we're also going to explore an important case study in the life sciences industry to really ground all of these high level concepts. So without further ado, let's jump into part one. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first episode of vibrations, a TMC podcast, I'm your host, Daniel Litwin, the voice of B2B and folks, Thanks so much for joining us on this first episode of the show. We're really excited to kick off the show with you and introduce a case study as really our first talking point and a perfect example for why the technology that TMC has prided itself on for years is so critical for so many industries. So as we kick off our show, I want to make sure that you've got all the TMC content you need and make sure that you are queued up to catch all future episodes. So make sure that you're heading to our website tech MFG again tech MFG for more pieces of TMC content, including articles, blogs, videos and more. We'll also be publishing future episodes of the podcast on the site, but if you want just the podcast in audio form, you can find that on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just hit subscribe and you'll have a full catalog of all of our previous episodes whenever you decide to tune in and, of course, notifications as we drop new ones. So team, this is big, right? We're finally breaking into the podcast content space as we stake our thought leadership flag in the world of discrete part manufacturing and state of the art. Vibration control strategies and technologies is something that we've been pioneering and setting a standard for years. But now we're delivering some more specific podcast content in this space, and we're excited to see how that pans out as well. And you know, as our clients in industries like semiconductor manufacturing, photonics, surface metrology and life sciences all understand even the slightest whisper of the wind or the rumble. Excuse me, the rumblings of a public transit miles away can create vibrational nuisances that are more than just a nuisance, right? Especially for highly sensitive instruments and mission critical research, testing and product development. And that vibration is no joke. It has to be quelled somehow, and TMC has been part of the solution, both in the use of these tools and also in the research process and development of these tools. And though TMCF products have become an essential tool themselves for vibration control, sometimes solving these building vibrational challenges extend beyond just a vibration cancellation table isolator or in tool solution. So to really paint an accurate picture of what it takes to craft a solution to these challenges, as our first episode of the podcast, we're going to center. One specific case study that would be the development of a new cancer Research Center and its cryo electron microscopy techniques to highlight why an ecosystem of strategies and solutions is so critical and how TMC works in tandem with other companies like our guests today to create real solutions for life science professionals. So again, we're going to kick off this show by focusing on that one case study and really paint a picture for why TMC is part of a larger, important ecosystem for our clients industries. So let's go ahead and jump in. I want to introduce our two guests. First up, we're joined by Ahmaud bahjat. He's president of acoustic consultants, which provides acoustical and vibrational consulting and engineering solutions to labs and research facilities, with other clients as well. Amod, great to have you on. How are you doing? Fine how about yourself? Thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you again for joining us and sharing your expertise here on the first episode of the show. We're really excited to have you on. And then joined with the TMC team. We're also here with Mike Georgopoulos. He's North American sales manager for TMCF. Mike, great to have you on as well. How are you? I'm great. Thanks, Daniel. Yeah, it's a pleasure getting you on as well to give us the TMC angle and really round out our perspective today. So I'm excited to play off of both of your perspectives here on this project. It was a big one, a lot of very niche hurdles to solve, even for the already sort of, you know, niche work that you'll do. But I think this is going to help us better understand again that ecosystem that TMC is a part of and how your two companies work together to create these real solutions for life sciences. So what I want to do first is set the scene for vibration control in this specific industry. If you had to give us a general overview, how is the challenge of reducing vibration disruption impacting life science research today just kind of at large? What are you hearing from your clients as some of the most critical ways that those nuisances can actually impact their work? Yeah, Yeah. So, so live science is basically the world of micro and nanoscale. Neal, that involves in not only life sciences, in many of the industries where R&D is needed, besides the manufacturing production, it's migrated to nanoscale these days where not only the scientists are looking at subatomic structure of could be a cell, a cancer cell, or it could be a semiconductor component. But what they are actually on top of that, especially in life sciences, they are actually now looking and manipulating the atomic and subatomic structure in form of nanoscience. So, so the challenge for all of us is to make such tools and precision tools operate successfully to allow the scientists to perform what they need to do. In terms of manipulating and analyzing different species in this case, you know, like in this particular example project, we are not going to be talking today, cancer cell and and so that is the challenge and for us to create an environment that such tools can operate and those are skm's TMH forms and so forth. Yeah and I'd like to second that and say what I'm on off of. What my mama was saying was that, you know, all fields of research, life science included, but semiconductor, they're all trending towards the need to image the need to resolve the need to perform operations at smaller and smaller and smaller scales. And the interesting thing about that is the smaller and smaller you try to perform operations like these, these ultra precision operations, as we kind of coined, the phrase is vibration becomes more and more of a problem. So the smaller you get, the more of an influence external vibration has on what you're trying to do. And these external vibration sources are similar to what you said before. Daniel the wind shaking, the building, a train going by on tracks, people walking around inside and outside the labs. And it's a fact of really many industries that the more. Small, you try to do things, and the closer you approach the nanoscale and even the Angstrom scale, the more vibration of the problem. Yeah, and I could add just Daniel, and that is that this example project that we'll be talking about today is a perfect example of the setting. The scene, basically the challenges that we, we encounter the real life. And so this is actually a really good case study to be launching your podcast. Yeah and I think our audience and our clients will soon hear, even if you're not in life sciences, a lot of these trends are the same, right, the scope of work. Again, like Mike said, get smaller and the room for error gets smaller, too. Not that there was really any room for error to begin with, but you know, dealing with. Now, dealing with sizes that themselves need very specific tools to even deal with, to even produce at a high level and produce at an efficacious level, right? Something that your clients can trust for mission critical research and use is essential and is a trend that has been pushing through these industries life sciences included for years now. But are there any more pressing factors that are amplifying any of these challenges as of late, right? So maybe what have been the most recent updates to that scope of nanotechnology that are, I guess, Yeah. Again, amplifying the challenges are just making it uniquely difficult to solve these challenges for life sciences research. You know, think of what it did as we are going down this miniaturization and all scale and beyond. We are basically plateauing with the background that basically the entire Earth is not immune to. So there's real vibration, even if you go in the middle of a desert, you know, so there's just, you know, that's the reality. So so we are pushing down to a scale where we are controlled by the background. And so then we have to turn back and try to figure out a solution within technologies similar to TMC. In fact, in this case study project, when I encountered you would realize that I did. You know, I could find solutions to get to a certain level from structural foundation point of view in the setting and the site that we had. But beyond that, I needed extra technology, and that's how I had to bring in TMC solution to get me home from where I could get from the structural side. And so just paint a good picture of really how we have to bring in technologies to solve the problem. Because beyond that, you know, you are controlled by the entire, you know, globe Earth. You know, that has a limitation, right? Yeah and this type of thing, this type of problem is a common problem. And it's a problem that needs to be solved in a lot of different places around the world and in a lot of different industries. So here's a one really good example where Ahmaud's company designed a building that was designed for life science research, and it housed these cryo electron microscopes, which are used to image biological molecules down to the Angstrom level. And when am designed the building he was designing on a site that was actually a very noisy site. So as much as his company could do to build a quiet building, he still needed more vibration cancellation. And that's and that's where team came in. That's where TMC came in. And we see this kind of thing in other industries and we see it every day. A good example is in the semiconductor industry, where the big microchip manufacturers, folks like Samsung and Intel and TSMC and globalfoundries, who are pushing the limits as to how small of a microchip we can to make our cell phones faster and use less power and be able to store more data. We hear things in this industry like the node size, and now people are starting to talk about 5 nanometer nodes and 3 nanometer nodes. And these are going into facilities which are highly vibration, which have high levels of vibration, which perform operations on instruments that are vibrationally sensitive. And so. So this is an area in the current space where we're seeing a lot of vibration need for vibration control. And another current event in the life science side is COVID. You know, we're starting to image the COVID virus on these cryo electron microscopes at various places in the United States and around the world, again, a highly vibration sensitive application built in facilities that are meant to be very quiet facilities. But sometimes you just need that extra bit more of vibration control. And this is where you know, companies like TMC and vac partner to create environments where researchers and engineers and industrial scientists can be confident in performing their work and getting done what they need to get done. I'm glad you brought up cryo electron microscopy, especially in the COVID example. You know, I assume we're going to have some listeners who aren't in the life sciences space. So to get a little more granular before we pitch to the main research project, we're going to be breaking down today. Can you lay out for us some of the areas where cryo electron microscopy is most sensitive to that whole ecosystem of vibration, right? So if it's coming from the lab floor itself, if it's coming from the building and sort of the natural sway of buildings and then also from the surrounding area, right? Public transit could be wind, environmental noise, or even just general commotion from the city below. Give us that, I guess, just dot connection, right? For how exactly cryo electron microscopy is affected by those factors? Yeah, it's a great, great question. You know, an interesting anecdote from the vibration industry and from the industry, if you want to call it that nanotechnology is. And a lot of times these smaller and object, you want to look at the bigger your instrument needs to be. And it's got an interesting parallel when you're looking out in space, the farther out you want to see something out in space, well, sort of the bigger the telescope needs to be. So the farther you want to look, the bigger industry you need, the smaller you want to look, the bigger an instrument you need. These extremely large instruments are very, very sensitive to vibration because there's a lot of opportunity for vibration to be absorbed into the instrument and also a lot of things on the instrument that create vibration for itself from its own operation. So we have these environments that these instruments are being put in and they run them 24/7. So there's always opportunities for transient vibration to come in that vibration that may not have been detected at the time the site was surveyed for suitability for use with that tool. We have transient vibrations, we have rising vibration over time and we have people in the facility. We have elevators, we have traffic, wind, all sorts of different motion and energy being introduced in the building and even in the room itself. These are very, very large tools and they have acoustic enclosures that are meant to absorb acoustic noise. But that acoustic noise then becomes vibration. And you need to consider that when you're designing not only an instrument but a tool, but a vibration control strategy. So, so they're extremely complex instruments. They've got sensitivity to magnetic fields, which we also work on. They've got they've got sensitivity to. I mentioned acoustics, but also a temperature and humidity sensitivity is another part of cryo electron microscopy that makes the facilities that they go into, like the ones that Ahmaud company designs. So sort of challenging to build. Well, said, love it now. All right, folks, that's it for the first part of this three part series with Ahmaud and Mike. Hopefully this helped paint a good introductory picture for the key industries that TMC and vac support and the kinds of challenges they solve for their customers. We're going to be getting more granular into the case study and how each of the two companies plays an essential role in creating said vibration control and isolation solutions, but before part to make sure that you're all tapped into all of our content. So head to tech MFG again tech MFG to make sure that you get all of our supporting content, including other articles and videos, and also subscribe to vibrations on Apple Podcasts and Spotify to make sure you don't miss out on episode two and three of this three parter I'm your host, Daniel Litwin, the voice of to and we'll catch you on the next episode of vibrations.
