Case Study: Audemars Piguet achieves 50% reduction in development time with ANSYS simulation

Audemars Piguet - Customer Case Study

Audemars Piguet & Cie SA, a Swiss maker of high‑precision luxury watches, faced the challenge of designing an ultra‑accurate date‑change mechanism whose tiny, flexible parts must move reliably within thousandths of a millimeter and appear instantaneous to the eye. To avoid costly, iterative prototyping and to capture the mechanism’s complex nonlinear dynamics, Audemars Piguet turned to ANSYS, using ANSYS Mechanical and ANSYS LS‑DYNA for high‑fidelity simulation.

ANSYS implemented transient dynamic and explicit analyses with nonlinear contact modeling to characterize and compare design variants, then validated the simulations against physical tests. The ANSYS‑driven solution met all performance criteria, was launched into production without further prototypes, and helped Audemars Piguet cut development time by half while delivering excellent agreement between simulation and experiment.

Audemars Piguet