(TNS) — A local Pittsburgh startup is seeking to perfect the art of surfaces.

The things we touch are meticulously designed to feel the way they do: the sleek curves of a car, the antiglare glass of a computer screen, the rubber sole of a shoe or the rugged finish of a stone bench.

“It affects the feel of products, whether they feel expensive — whatever that means — or feel nice to the touch,” said Tevis Jacobs, founder of Surface Design Solutions. “It affects the look, but also it affects the fuel efficiency of your car.”

Manufacturers have countless methods and tools for finishing the surface of their products, including sanding or polishing. But each method has multiple properties that can affect that surface finish — even, for example, how big the sand particles are.

And why the “roughness,” or terrain, of a surface matters, is because it impacts performance. Whether there’s roughness on a microscopic level, or on a tangible level that the eye can see or our sense of touch can feel is largely controlled by manufacturers.

Surface Design Solutions provides manufacturers the software to optimize their product design’s surface finish and, on the factory floor, manage quality control so that more parts work longer, and products have perfect finishes.

That work will be aided by a $365,000 investment from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, announced Wednesday morning, which Jacobs said will help them hone the platform for its users, and expand its reach to address concerns over an aging workforce in the manufacturing industry.

“It isn’t that they need new capital equipment, it isn’t that they need a new microscope. It isn’t that they need new polishing approaches,” Jacobs said. “They just need new specifications and new understanding of how surface finish drives performance.”

Jacobs has worked with clients to better seal jet engines, to optimize medical devices so that blood is stored properly, to reduce friction and wear between auto parts, to make brain implants more biocompatible — even to try and develop slip-resistant floors.

He has taught mechanical engineering and material science at the University of Pittsburgh for 11 years. Two years ago, he decided to take everything he’d observed about surfaces from working in the medical device industry, all the way through a Ph.D. and professorial career, and create a startup to solve the surfaces problem.

It’s far from a simple problem, he said.

Although engineers have simulation software to help design and optimize what their products should look like, how they should fit together — the kind of engineering local simulation software company Ansys by Synopsys has mastered — the manufacturing industry is lacking a similar software to perfect surface finish, he said. And it’s not only the products being made, but the factory tools themselves that depend on surface science for optimal performance.

For manufacturers, that surface optimization translates to money saved.

He mentioned a recent client that was “suffering 35% non-productive time” because there was a problem ejecting product parts from the factory molding equipment.

“It wasn’t that they didn’t find the right number, it was that they were looking in the wrong place,” he said, “and we found them a new place to look, which was based on the science of surfaces.”

Surface Design Solutions’ software can work with narrow datasets, something he said makes the company stand out by getting insights from small samples.

“[We] never would have been able to solve this problem through traditional metrics,” he said, “but our physics-informed AI guided them … and was able to reduce that from 35% to 12% downtime.”

“We’re talking about millions of dollars.”

Just like how Ansys by Synopsys touts a physics-informed approach to its simulation engineering, the physics that informs Surface Design Solutions’ machine-learning software makes it different from the kind of AI that animates ChatGPT or Claude. That physics-informed AI whittles down the proper surface texture or dimensions for manufacturers from a complex range of surface models and use cases.

And the humans — “the very senior, very experienced machinists” — who know surface science as second nature, and who manufacturers rely on to do this work, are aging out of the field, Jacobs said.

In Pennsylvania, almost a third of the manufacturing industry is 55 and older, according to the Workers Age by Industry and Area Dashboard on the state’s website.

“When you don’t have standards that effectively control how you create the surface finish, then when that expert machinist retires, they struggle to pass on their expertise,” Jacobs said. “That knowledge can be entirely lost to the company, and it can also be very challenging for newer workers to develop those decades of expertise.”

Those decades of experience give experts a “calibrated eyeball” that’s very difficult to describe and to train in others, he said.

“We work directly with those machinists, and we started hearing from them that they’re having trouble training the next generation. And we hear from the new workers that they’re having trouble getting up to speed fast enough.”

That’s where Surface Design Solutions’ two software programs come in — there’s a software specifically for engineers, and a software made for the machinists and shop-floor workers. The former helps with design before production, and the latter sits on the manufacturing equipment itself to make sure machines are working properly.

The new grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation will be used to make Surface Design Solutions more “people focused,” Jacobs said. The startup plans to use the funding in part to interview expert machinists and new workers, to make sure the software is appropriate for the experts, while also familiar and accessible to the younger cohort.

It’s how Jacobs’ startup will be able to integrate the calibrated eyeball into tangible algorithms.

“We’re helping them be even more effective at their jobs,” he said. “Working with younger workers, getting them to be machinists, to be shop floor technicians, production workers — that’s part of our business.”