This article explains the difference between electricity as energy and electricity as a signal, which is what electrical engineering deals with, and introduces the applications of electrical engineering and how the technologies it has developed have impacted our lives and industries, most notably MRI technology.
When you think of the Department of Electrical Engineering, what do you think it studies? When people hear the word “electricity,” they usually think of the static electricity they might feel on a cold winter day. We also think of the electricity we need to light up a room on a dark night or to run our appliances. Electricity is an essential part of modern life, and we see it all around us. However, many people don’t realize what can be done when electricity and engineering meet.
Long ago, the Department of Electrical Engineering was called the Department of Electrical Engineering, but recently it was renamed to the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering. Why did electricity and information go hand in hand? There are many reasons, but I’ll try to explain what I think it is and what we do in the Department of Electrical Engineering.
In electrical engineering, electricity can be divided into two main categories. One is electricity as energy, and the other is electricity as signals. I am interested in the field that deals with electricity as a signal, which is already very advanced and has a great impact on many different industries. It even has applications in the field of electrical energy. Let me first explain the field of electrical energy.
Energy can be understood as the power source that makes things move. Electricity as energy is created in power plants, transmitted across the country, and used to run many devices. People who study electrical energy study how electricity can be produced efficiently, stored in batteries, and transmitted cheaply and without loss.
Electrical energy is more organized than other forms of energy, such as heat energy, so it doesn’t change its shape as much when transmitted over long distances, resulting in less loss. Electrical energy can also be easily converted into other forms of energy, making it well suited to handle the vast amounts of energy that humanity uses. It’s hard to imagine life without electrical energy, which is why power engineers have developed it so well.
Next, we’ll discuss electricity as signaling, which is a broader concept than electricity as power. In electrical engineering, a signal is defined as a physical quantity that carries information. Specifically, it uses an electrical physical quantity, such as voltage, as a carrier of information. There are two fields: signal processing, which deals with efficiently processing signals and converting them into something we can understand, and communications, which deals with sending and receiving signals, like radio or telephone. It’s a field that deals with the signals themselves.
For us to be able to use this technology anywhere and anytime, we need more sophisticated technology. There is the field of circuits, which creates circuits that can amplify and store small signals sent to distant places via telecommunications, and the field of semiconductor devices that make up the circuits. There are also device and electrophysics fields that convert processed signals to screens, systems fields that make sure systems work reliably, and computer fields that process the information in signals. The study of voltages as signals has evolved to a high degree of precision.
The scope of electrical engineering is getting wider and wider, and it would take a lot of space to introduce just a few of its subfields. In this article, we’ll focus on electrical engineering as it applies to MRI. MRI is a collection of electrical engineering technologies. At its core, MRI uses a powerful electromagnet, which you may have seen in elementary school science class when you place iron powder near an electromagnet and watch it be attracted to it. The electromagnet built into an MRI is much more powerful than that, which is why you can’t get an MRI with a metal object.
These powerful electromagnets align the water molecules in your body in the direction of the magnetic field. Normally, electromagnetic forces are in equilibrium and we can’t feel them, but when this equilibrium is disrupted, something amazing happens, like static electricity or lightning strikes. In MRI, we use electromagnetic waves of a specific frequency to excite the water molecules, which causes them to emit electromagnetic waves. Depending on the density of the water, the intensity of the emitted electromagnetic waves varies, which can be used to image the condition of the tissues in the body.
In the early days of MRI, it took a long time to acquire the signal, which made patients feel claustrophobic, but advances in signal processing have made it possible to obtain high-resolution images in a fraction of the time, and it is now possible to see the heart beating in real time. As you can see, MRI is an electrical engineering technology that is playing an important role in the precise processing of biometric information.
Electrical engineering is already deeply embedded in our daily lives, with applications in healthcare, 3D imaging, artificial intelligence, and many other fields. The field of electrical engineering is expanding, and in the future, it will not only be about signal processing, but also about enabling computers to process signals more intelligently.
