Case Study - Vibration Control in an Advanced Cancer Research Facility
Three universities received a donated piece of land at a river bank in a busy metropolitan setting surrounded by highways, bridges, light rail traffic, and long-term construction staging and activities. They planned to construct a state-of-the art cancer research facility housing high end inspection tools such as TEMs and SEMs. Due to the surrounding activities, the site presented itself with an unstable, active, and high ambient vibration with amplitude well above 2000 micro-inches/sec. The facility vibration criterion was set to be 50 micro-inches/sec. This podcast will describe how Vibro-Acoustics Consultants and TMC partnered to solve this challenging problem.
Ahmad Bayat, P.E., President at Vibro-Acoustic Consultants, and Mike Georgalis, North American Sales Manager at TMC, joined Vibrations’ host, Daniel J. Litwin, for an in-depth 3-part discussion on vibration control strategies and technologies, including insight on a recent Cancer research lab project with a challenging micro-vibration design. In this first episode, Bayat and Georgalis laid the foundation for understanding mission-critical environments' challenges with building vibration.
“The world of micro and nano-scale that involves not only life sciences but in many of the industries where R&D is needed, besides the manufacturing and production, it’s migrated to nano-scale these days,” Bayat said. “Not only are scientists looking at the subatomic structure of a cancer cell, or it could be a semiconductor component, but on top of that, they are looking at and manipulating the atomic and subatomic structure. So, the challenge for all of us is to make 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 example it was life science research, but there are other industries facing similar challenges. “These types of problems are common problems, and they need to be solved in different places around the world and in a lot of different industries,” Georgalis said. “A good example is in the semiconductor industry where the big microchip manufacturers are pushing the limits to how small a microchip they can make.” These chips require extremely stable manufacturing conditions, and thus these companies rely on partners like TMC to create vibration control solutions for ever more demanding situations.