An Insight to the World of Mechanical Engineering

Mechanical engineering has become an expanding field in recent years. This blog is designed to familiarize viewers on the field of mechanical engineering and the considerations that surround it. You may or may not realize the impact, but mechanical engineering has a crucial impact on your everyday life. From the refrigerator that keeps your food cold, to the car you drive to work, to the power that is emitted by the light bulb you turn on when you wake up in the morning, mechanical engineering is everywhere. Although it is a very ancient practice, there are certain divisions that have made extreme strides in recent years. 

Mechanical engineering is a very wide discipline. People employed in this field can fulfil jobs of designing new product, manufacturing products, and building and maintaining mechanical systems such as power plants or heating and air systems. For fulfillment in these careers, a mechanical engineer should have a profound interest in how things are build and why they work the way they do. Often, people forming a career as a mechanical engineer were the children who destroyed things by taking them apart to see what was inside. 

On a college education side, mechanical engineers must be trained in areas of material science, static and dynamic structural analysis, thermodynamic and fluid analysis, and computer design programs just to name a few. Materials science can be an important tool to forecast how materials will react based upon their properties or to design a completely new material. Static and dynamic analysis deals with making calculations on objects that are at rest or in motion. These calculations could be with forces, velocities, or moments of inertia to name a few. Thermodynamic and fluid analysis deals with the prediction of how energy will effect heat and temperature or fluid motion. Depending on the engineers’ job, computer design programs can be their most vital tool. These programs easily allow the 3D visualization of products at a conceptual state. Very complicated designs can be easily presented in great detail with dimensions like shown below in Figure 1. Programs like these save time and money while driving innovation of tomorrow’s products. 

Figure 1

Values are important in any engineering discipline. If attention to detail is not followed, a lot of the products a mechanical engineer may deal with can be dangerous to users or bystanders. It is understood that new designs will go through heavy scrutiny and testing before the concept will ever hit a public eye. This ensures the value of a high level of safety. Mechanical engineers also value optimizing products or systems. Most mechanical engineers go into a task with the mindset that everything can be improved in some way. Then using engineering analysis to find and make the improvement, the engineer will make changes to the product or system. 

                Using the skills and values listen above, mechanical engineers have a hand in almost every product that is made in the world. Day-to-day life would be very primitive if it were not for mechanical engineering. Products in industries like automotive, aerospace, energy conversion, automation, and manufacturing would not exist or be as safe as they are today. Everyday, tasks such as driving a car become fearless and natural due to innovations and new technologies designed by mechanical engineers. 

                In summary, this blog is designed to give an inside look at mechanical engineering and the concerns surrounding it. From this first blog post, one can conclude that mechanical engineering plays a vital role in the world. Day-to-day life would become very difficult and cumbersome if the products innovated from mechanical engineering did not exist. Mechanical engineers must be skilled in a wide variety of areas to effectively perform their duties to the standards and values of their profession, as well as, the world.