On this third and final episode of Vibrations’ look at vibration building design, host Daniel J Litwin concluded his discussion with Ahmad Bayat, P.E., President at Vibro-Acoustic Consultants (VACC), and Mike Georgalis, North American Sales Manager at the Technical Manufacturing Corporation (TMC.) This final portion of dialogue between Litwin, Bayat, and Georgalis brings together insights on vibration building challenges and how partners like TMC and VACC work in harmony to collaborate on total solutions for their clients.

Georgalis said TMC works with on-site vibration data and creates solutions to lower those vibration levels to meet the customer’s specs and instruments. These instruments can’t operate with vibration levels above a certain threshold, so TMC needs to overcome any challenges to meet those goals. “We have a transfer function and a non-performance level,” Georgalis said. “We have the ability to increase that performance, decrease that performance as needed, but in a lot of cases, our standard performance is enough to get those input levels to the output levels that are needed.”

Any vibration cancellation plan for a building must consider an instrument’s internal vibration isolation system. “If you are going to go with any vibration cancellation system, especially an active system, it’s absolutely critical that system is compatible with the isolators that are inside what’s built to support,” Georgalis said. “A lot of these types of instruments, the transmission electron microscopes, the Cryo TEMs, the NMRs, any kind of semiconductor type of manufacturing tools, a lot of different types of microscopes, they all have their own internal isolation systems, and the vast majority of these types of systems if you’re going to put them on an active cancellation system it’s absolutely critical that that active cancellation system is complementary.”

On this third and final episode of Vibrations’ look at vibration building design, host Daniel J Litwin concluded his discussion with Ahmad Bayat, P.E., President at Vibro-Acoustic Consultants (VACC), and Mike Georgalis, North American Sales Manager at the Technical Manufacturing Corporation (TMC.) This final portion of dialogue between Litwin, Bayat, and Georgalis brings together insights on vibration building challenges and how partners like TMC and VACC work in harmony to collaborate on total solutions for their clients.

Georgalis said TMC works with on-site vibration data and creates solutions to lower those vibration levels to meet the customer’s specs and instruments. These instruments can’t operate with vibration levels above a certain threshold, so TMC needs to overcome any challenges to meet those goals. “We have a transfer function and a non-performance level,” Georgalis said. “We have the ability to increase that performance, decrease that performance as needed, but in a lot of cases, our standard performance is enough to get those input levels to the output levels that are needed.”

Any vibration cancellation plan for a building must consider an instrument’s internal vibration isolation system. “If you are going to go with any vibration cancellation system, especially an active system, it’s absolutely critical that system is compatible with the isolators that are inside what’s built to support,” Georgalis said. “A lot of these types of instruments, the transmission electron microscopes, the Cryo TEMs, the NMRs, any kind of semiconductor type of manufacturing tools, a lot of different types of microscopes, they all have their own internal isolation systems, and the vast majority of these types of systems if you’re going to put them on an active cancellation system it’s absolutely critical that that active cancellation system is complementary.”

For this second part of Vibrations’ look at vibration building design, host Daniel J Litwin continued his discussion with Ahmad Bayat, P.E., President at Vibro-Acoustic Consultants (VACC), and Mike Georgalis, North American Sales Manager at the Technical Manufacturing Corporation (TMC.) They began discussing the life science case study teased on this episode’s first part. Bayat and Georgalis also offered their perspectives on support roles TMC and VACC play in reducing vibration and building noise for fine-tuned research and mission-critical industries.

“Everybody at TMC loves to solve problems,” Georgalis said. “And we’re the kind of folks that like to work with our customers to understand their problems, and we view ourselves as someone the customer can come to with their challenging applications, and we’re going work with them to figure it out.” When the industry needs a specialized vibration mitigation system, Georgalis said TMC is the company people call.

And Bayat said the complexities of this type of technology could feel mysterious to even the most learned engineers. Hence, his approach is to unravel these mysteries and make them more tangible for his customers to understand. Bayat explained that everyone understands the basic principle of an earthquake. Still, while those seismic events don’t occur often, the nano-vibration issues his team works to control do.

In the challenge of the case study, a cancer research center to be built on donated land adjacent to a riverbed in the heart of Portland, OR, the primary concerns from an engineering standpoint were noise and vibrations. “There were a lot of surrounding activities,” Bayat said. Continual issues this new building would face were noise and vibrations from railroad tracks, highways, and a construction staging area for municipal projects that would exist for years to come.

Critical industries need building infrastructure that eliminates even the slightest whisper of the wind or rumblings of public transit miles away. Sensitive instruments used in mission-critical research, testing, and product equipment must exist in a vibration-free environment. Industry-leading TCM understands these needs, and their products have become an essential tool for vibration control to solve building vibration challenges. Ahmad Bayat, P.E., President at Vibro-Acoustic Consultants, and Mike Georgalis, North American Sales Manager at the Technical Manufacturing Corporation (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 vibrations.

“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 scientists are 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.” And in this case study, the precision needed involves cancer cells.

To conquer this world of vibrations at a nano-scale level may pose challenges. Still, they’re ones Bayat and Georgalis enjoy taking on no matter the industry requiring such cutting-edge technology.“

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 manufacturing conditions without vibrations, and thus these companies rely on partners like TCM to create vibrationless solutions.