Electrical And Mechanical Engineering: Everything You Need to Know to Master the Subject - in One Book!

462 Pages·2021·21.26 MB·english

by  David Baker

Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Dawn of Ideas – the Empirical Age
Chapter 2: Understanding Forces – the Scientific Age
Chapter 3: Manipulation of Forces
Chapter 4: Mechanisms
Chapter 5: A Choice of Materials
Chapter 6: Keeping the Machines Moving
Chapter 7: Engineering the Systems
Chapter 8: What is Reliability?
Chapter 9: Nuclear Engineering
Chapter 10: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Chapter 11: Power Production and Generation
Chapter 12: Electromechanics
Chapter 13: Computing Machines and Artificial Intelligence
Glossary
Suggested Reading
Introduction
Preceded by the era of toolmaking and the introduction of farming,
engineering has been the third age of humankind in its evolution
from the Stone Age to the world of machines, industrialization,
telecommunications and transportation. Engineers have made the
world we live in today and created the technology that informs the
lives of people around the globe. It is the purpose of this book to
show how that has come about, to examine the various disciplines
within the field of electrical and mechanical engineering, and to
introduce the reader to the basic principles that underpin an activity
that links physics, chemistry, mathematics and technology.
An important part of understanding this world of complex and
sophisticated machines is the way the entrepreneurs of the past
forged natural materials into compounds and alloys, reforming them
and exchanging levels of energy and producing heat engines. From
this came an industrial revolution, founded in Britain and exported
to the developed and developing world, making possible previously
unimagined opportunities for all. In the following pages, several
separate steps in the development of electrical and mechanical
engineering are discussed with their respective origins and
development paths. But this is not a history book.
The field of electrical engineering is growing fast, changing
according to the evolving texture of human society. The extraordinary
growth in human population levels is borne out by the unanticipated
demands made on all these aforementioned capabilities, supporting a
world in which it has taken all of human history to reach a
population of 2 billion and the span of a human lifetime to
quadruple that number. This has placed stress on the existing
infrastructure and forced new and innovative technologies, to come
out of research and development in all fields of engineering.
With ever-demanding environmental concerns, the challenges now
are immense. Issues that can translate into outstanding opportunities
for new and aspiring engineers can be seen as daunting, or they can
be grasped as routes to professional career fulfilment and a stimulus
to ingenuity and innovation. Opportunities today are greater than
they have ever been. There are new and highly specialized career
development paths involving almost every facet of life, and the
demand for improved and more efficient machines has never been
greater. The retail and manufacturing worlds demand increasingly
more sophisticated and effective solutions, and it is the task of the
modern engineer to meet those demands in full.
The pioneering days are not over and in some respects are only
just beginning. What in a previous generation took several decades
to emerge can now be realized in weeks or months, and what
corporations and big companies controlled in the past is now
delivered by new start-up companies and truly creative thinkers. Be it
in transforming the wasteful ways of the past into efficient and
sustainable solutions for the future or in satisfying the needs of an
environmentally conscious society, engineers will continue to
contribute as enablers in a future world, building a better place for
humans to occupy.
Examples of engineering ancient and modern: A model of the ancient
Greek antithykera (pages and the Space Shuttle taking off.

Early engineering
Invention and discovery have gone hand in hand from the dawn of
abstract thinking – activities buried deep in the ancient past. From
the Palaeolithic stone toolmakers of more than 3 million years ago
to the application of known principles of engineering and science in
the 21st century, the observation and use of natural laws and
mechanical practicalities have underpinned all aspects of modern
society. The collective application of laws, principles and ideas have
forged new ways of working through a process of test and
evaluation. In fact, for several millennia that was the only way of
fashioning natural materials into tools and working machines.
Long before the scientific application of calculation and
extrapolation, hand tools were shaped to improve the ability of
primitive humans to survive the rigours of a hostile environment and
outwit predators. In fact, defence against a wide range of aggressive
animals must have played a significant part in the development of
those parts of the brain responsible for nurturing creative thinking.
In turn, that would lead to a level of cognitive development where
observation, experimentation and evaluation served as a prerequisite
for stored learning. And when that was achieved, humanity put its
running shoes on!
Stone tools from Skorba in Malta show the diversity of creative ingenuity.