If the electricity were to suddenly go out one day, our daily lives would be disrupted. Electricity is the essential energy source for all electronic devices and appliances, including lights, refrigerators, computers, and more. Electrical engineering is the field that creates and transmits this electricity and develops electronic devices that utilize it, making our lives easier and more efficient. Advances in electrical engineering, combined with other fields such as electronics and physics, will make our future brighter and more innovative.
Imagine that one day your house suddenly loses power, and it’s very dark because the lights don’t turn on. The refrigerator won’t work either, so it can no longer keep the food inside cold. You’d have to hurry to eat your food or move it to a cooler place before it spoils. You won’t be able to use your computer or phone. You won’t be able to communicate with the outside world, and you won’t be able to use the internet to get information from the outside world. You won’t have access to a computer, so you won’t have access to documentation software and storage media like USB or external hard drives. You’ll have to write everything down by hand on paper, and you’ll have to carry tons of paper and books with you. You won’t have access to your favorite TV or radio. You won’t even be able to use your oil-fired boiler. Even if you heat with oil, the boiler needs electricity to run. The most we could do would be to use water and gas. But even then, we can only use them because we have electricity. The process of transporting water and gas to our homes also requires electricity. Without electricity, our lives would be paralyzed.
Currently, electricity is our main source of energy, and all objects and machines use electrical energy to run. It’s what makes the world go round, and it’s intimately involved in every aspect of our lives. Electricity is more than just a convenience for everyday life; it has a profound impact on industry and the economy. Without electricity in the production process, factories would not run, and in hospitals, critical life-support equipment would not function, which could be fatal. Electricity is also essential in education. Digital devices and the internet allow students to gain knowledge and teachers to teach more effectively. As you can see, electricity is a vital resource for all aspects of modern society.
Electrical engineering is the field that deals with everything to do with electricity: generating it, transporting it to where it’s needed, and developing electronics that work using it. As electricity has become our primary energy source, electrical engineering is essential in any field or machine. It is interdisciplinary and has a huge impact on a wider area than its scope. Electrical engineering can be divided into two main fields: systems and electronics. The systems field involves using existing materials and changing their shape or structure to perform desired behaviors, and is composed of electrical energy, communication, and control. For example, changing the shape or structure of an antenna so that a TV or smartphone can receive higher-quality broadcasts and voice. Electronics, on the other hand, is the study of physical phenomena at the scale of atoms or electrons to create materials with new electrical properties, and is composed of semiconductors and electrophysics. An example of electronics is the development of a new material that bends light so that the object appears transparent.
In the field of electronics, electrophysics is responsible for recent advances in smartphones and optical computers. Electrophysics is the study of the electrical properties and reactions of materials at the atomic scale, and although it is a branch of electrical engineering, it can be considered more of an applied science than an engineering science. In short, electrophysics is the study of the causes of electrical properties, such as why metals reflect light and glass transmits light. If you can find the physical reasons why metals and glasses have different properties on a scale as small as the size of an atom, you can use this principle to develop transparent electrodes, which are metals that are transparent. In the case of touch panels such as smartphones and tablets, liquid crystals are transparent so that the screen is visible to us, but they also need to act as electrically conductive electrodes, such as metals, to recognize human touch. Therefore, liquid crystal transparent electrodes are needed, and this need will increase with the current trend of most electronic devices becoming touch panels. So how do you make a transparent electrode? Think of a dumpling skin. The dumpling skin is made of opaque flour dough. However, when the dough is rolled out thinly to form the dumpling skin, it becomes transparent enough to see through the dumpling. This principle can also be applied to metal, and if you make metal extremely thin, about two or three atoms thick, it can transmit light. Therefore, a thin metal film is coated with transparent glass to make a transparent electrode. Currently, transparent electrodes are used in touch panels, electronic paper, solar cells, and more, most commonly in touch panels. However, researchers are actively working to make better quality transparent electrodes that are more electrically conductive and transparent, at a lower cost and through a simple process.
Electrical engineering is intimately involved in our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that the world is powered by electricity, as every object and device we use uses electricity. Therefore, electrical engineering is relevant to our lives in a wide range of fields, and advances in electrical engineering will directly change our lives. Among them, electrophysics can lead to the rapid development of electrical engineering by developing materials or composites with new physical properties that have never existed before. Therefore, we should pay attention to the field of electrophysics, even if it is unfamiliar and unfamiliar to us. We hope that the development of electrical engineering and electrophysics will change our lives for the better.
