Mechanical engineering is the study of understanding how things work, and using that understanding to design and build a variety of engineering products. It understands the properties of materials through the four forces, builds efficient systems to optimize the performance of cars, airplanes, appliances, and more. It also plays an important role in enriching human life by developing green energy and utilizing resources for a sustainable future.
The goal of engineering is to use the materials or laws that make up nature to create things that benefit humans. Engineering can be categorized into mechanical, electrical, chemical, and materials based on how it creates beneficial objects. Among these, mechanical engineering focuses on the “behavior” of objects, learning how to organize and combine the materials that make up objects. The term “motion” in mechanical engineering is not limited to visible movement, but also includes things like refrigerators and air conditioners that don’t seem to move but still perform their functions.
To make it easier to understand mechanical engineering, think of an object as a dish, and the motion of the object is the “flavor” of the dish, and mechanical engineering is the recipe for the “flavor.” In other words, mechanical engineering can be compared to the study of making dishes from the “ingredients” that make up the object through the cooking process. Just as you need to know the characteristics of your ingredients to cook well, it is important to understand the properties of your materials and how they react. This means that mechanical engineering is not just about making things, it’s about making them perform optimally in a given environment.
In mechanical engineering, before you start cooking, you’ll learn the essentials of cooking utensils. There are four main mechanics of cooking utensils: thermodynamics, dynamics, solid mechanics, and fluid mechanics. As the name suggests, thermodynamics deals with the heat of materials, kinetics deals with the motion of materials, solid mechanics deals with the state of rigid materials, and hydrodynamics deals with the state of flowing materials such as water or air. Just as you need to know how to peel and cut ingredients like onions and potatoes into edible pieces before you can make a dish, learning how to use the four cooking utensils properly is essential to properly chop and slice ingredients in the right way for each utensil.
The process of learning the basic mechanics of mechanical engineering is actually very organized and complex. Basic mechanics theories help you understand the laws of physics and how to use them to solve various problems. For example, thermodynamics deals with the transfer and conversion of heat energy, which is directly used in the design of air conditioners and refrigerators. Kinematics analyzes the motion of objects, which is essential to understanding how cars and robots work. Solid mechanics and fluid mechanics also play an important role in different fields, and all the theories combine harmoniously to design and build real mechanical systems.
Once you’ve mastered the use of the four major cooking appliances, you’ll move on to recipes that describe how to cook a full-blown meal. Just like cooking food, mechanical engineering recipes describe how to properly utilize the four utensils to add the ingredients in the right proportions, heat them in the right order, and adjust the heat or seasoning so that the ingredients combine well. There are many different recipes depending on the final dish that is created, and the types of recipes are categorized into elective courses for the third and fourth years. Some of the many recipes include automotive engineering, microengineering, and robotics, to name a few. Just like a recipe is a basic guide to making a dish, these subjects teach you the essential elements and different ways to build cars, robots, and more.
Some of the most famous dishes created by mechanical engineering recipes are cars, airplanes, refrigerators, air conditioners, and washing machines. The flavors of these dishes are such that most people can’t live without them for even a day. If you cooked them without following a mechanical engineering recipe, they wouldn’t taste as good: cars wouldn’t climb hills, airplanes would be giant tricycles on runways, and so on. It is the pivotal role of the mechanical engineering recipe that gives the engineering product its special flavor. So what is the secret to making this recipe taste special?
Let’s take a look at how a car is flavored by a mechanical engineering recipe. The powertrain of a car is organized in such a way that it transmits a large amount of force when going up a hill using a kinematic cooker, and the engine’s fuel supply is organized in such a way that it provides as much fuel as needed to produce the large amount of force using a hydrodynamic cooker. Thermodynamic cookware is used to effectively cool down the large amount of heat generated by the engine, and solid mechanics cookware is used to determine the materials that will allow the parts of the engine to withstand the high heat while it cools down. The automotive engineering cookbook explains how to use each of these tools in harmony and efficiency, so that a car built according to the recipe still tastes good when it goes up a hill.
In fact, while the ingredients used in mechanical engineering dishes may be purely natural, they are often the product of engineering in other fields or the result of research in the natural sciences. Therefore, even if you don’t know the details of how these ingredients are made, you still need to understand how they affect the flavor, so you have to break out of the confines of purely mechanical engineering recipes and make a lot of contacts with people from other fields, combine them and lead them in the direction you want to go, creating new concepts of mechanical engineering recipes that give the dish its ultimate flavor. In this respect, mechanical engineering can be said to be a major that allows you to fully demonstrate your leadership in the personal aspect and satisfy your need for a wide range of knowledge that exists in the world, and in the social aspect, it can be said to be a discipline that benefits people by bringing out various unique flavors of engineering products.
Mechanical engineering also plays an important role in solving environmental and energy problems. The development of sustainable energy sources and efficient resource utilization is one of the main challenges of modern mechanical engineering. For example, the development of electric and hybrid vehicles is advancing the technology of environmentally friendly vehicles, which is the result of a combination of mechanics, materials science, and electrical engineering. Wind turbines and photovoltaic systems are also designed and manufactured based on mechanical engineering principles. As such, mechanical engineering is making an important contribution to the sustainable development of our future society.
In the future, when you meet someone majoring in mechanical engineering, think of them as a chef who makes the products of engineering taste good. Remember that mechanical engineering is not just a discipline, but an important tool for enriching human life and creating a sustainable future. Mechanical engineers are changing the world with their innovative ideas and technologies, helping to make life better. Their efforts have resulted in a variety of engineering products that are indispensable in our daily lives.
