Miniswys uses Neural Concept Shape for the Design Optimization of Customized Ultrasonic Actuators

Miniswys is a swiss company developing ultrasonic piezo-electric actuators to achieve precise bidirectional movements, reaching very large strokes with low driving voltage in compact applications. In order to develop such a product, the engineers perform Finite element analysis simulations, to estimate the dynamic behavior of the design, by performing modal analysis. It is used to estimate the resonance frequencies and structural modes of the geometry under various conditions.

However, each application has its own set of requirements, where small design variations can lead to completely different modal behavior. In this context, Miniswys and Neural Concept have been successfully collaborating over the past months, to build a 3D Deep Learning based surrogate model. It allows to get an instantaneous and precise estimation of the dynamic behavior of these actuators, based on geometric and/or boundary conditions variations.

Using Neural Concept, Miniswys is able to explore in a very fast manner many different designs iterations, without the need of going through the full-fledged simulator at every step. Ultimately Miniswys is able to explore extensively the space of designs, to find innovative geometries, outperforming the classic ones, while drastically reducing the costs and time of the research and development phase. After using the tool, Raphaël Hoesli, CTO of Miniswys and directly involved in the project, expressed his satisfaction in the following words:

“Neural Concept enables us to be much more efficient to design products meeting our customers’ requirements. The feedback from our design iterations is so fast that Miniswys’ engineers can see the evolution of the performance quasi instantaneously while changing the design parameters. In other words, slow iterations are replaced by quick predictions which give us the possibility to intuitively improve the performances of our actuators.”

These successful results encouraged Miniswys to continue using Neural Concept to leverage on this surrogate model in shape optimization for piezo actuators.

Figure 1: Example of Miniswys linear ultrasonic actuator.
Figure 2: Comparison between the simulation and the neural network prediction on a test sample.

Neural Concept provides the leading AI-first engineering platform for product development. By embedding AI natively into design and simulation workflows, Neural Concept empowers engineering teams to compress development cycles from months to days, improve product performance across efficiency, safety, and sustainability, and scale AI adoption without costly, years-long integration.