Three universities had received a donated site at a river bank in a busy metropolitan setting surrounded by highways, bridges, light rail traffic, and long-term construction staging and activities among others. They proposed to construct a state-of-the art cancer research facility which will house high end inspection tools such as TEMs and SEMs. Due to the above surrounding activities, the site presented itself with an unstable, active, and high ambient vibration amplitude well above 1000 mi-cro-inches/sec. The facility vibration criterion was set to be 50 micro-inches/sec. Typically, vibration engineers wish to have an ambient level that lies below the final criterion limits with some margin to spare, such that they can use the remaining margin for facility sources contributions. This site defi-nitely created a challenging situation for the vibration design. The challenge of reducing the site am-bient by a factor of 20+ required creative solutions which resulted in a one-of-a-kind solution that on the surface might seem counter intuitive.
Vibro-Acoustic Consultants
