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    A Degree in a Book: Electrical And Mechanical Engineering: Everything You Need to Know to Master the Subject - in One Book!
    A Degree in a Book: Electrical And Mechanical Engineering: Everything You Need to Know to Master the Subject - in One Book!
    A Degree in a Book: Electrical And Mechanical Engineering: Everything You Need to Know to Master the Subject - in One Book!
    Ebook441 pages4 hours

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

    By David Baker

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    • Mechanical Engineering

    • Artificial Intelligence

    • Nuclear Engineering

    • Engineering

    • Electrical & Electronic Engineering

    • Technology Marches on

    • Technological Progress

    • Smart Guy

    • Scientific Discovery

    • Knowledge Is Power

    • Man Vs. Machine

    • Engineer

    • Power of Innovation

    • Rags to Riches

    • Power of Knowledge

    • Electrical Engineering

    • Materials Science

    • Industrial Revolution

    • Computing Machines

    • History of Technology

    About this ebook

    A concise introduction to all the key tenets of electrical and mechanical engineering degree course, written by former NASA engineer Dr David Baker.

    A Degree in a Book: Electrical and Mechanical Engineering is presented in an attractive landscape format in full-color. With timelines, feature spreads and information boxes, readers will quickly get to grips with the fundamentals of electrical and mechanical engineering and their practical applications.

    Covering Newtonian mechanics, nuclear engineering, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and more, this essential guide brings clarity to complex ideas. David Baker delves into the history and development of this far-reaching subject as well as the challenges of the future such as environmental responsibility.

    Complete with a useful glossary of key terms, this holistic introduction will equip students and laypeople alike with the knowledge of an engineering graduate.

    ABOUT THE SERIES: Get the knowledge of a degree for the price of a book with Arcturus Publishing's A Degree in a Book series. Written by experts in their fields, these highly visual guides feature handy timelines, information boxes, feature spreads and margin annotations, allowing readers to get to grips with complex subjects in no time.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcturus Publishing
    Release dateMay 1, 2021
    ISBN9781398807280
    A Degree in a Book: Electrical And Mechanical Engineering: Everything You Need to Know to Master the Subject - in One Book!
    Author

    David Baker

    David Baker has an interest in air and space projects and has written a number of books and articles on both subjects, many covering the technical history and programme changes that affected engineering projects in these fields. In 1986, David was elected a voting member of the International Academy of Astronautics and has received a number of international awards over the years, including the American Astronautical Society’s Frederick I Ordway III award for ‘sustained excellence in space coverage

    Read more from David Baker

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      A Degree in a Book - David Baker

      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 65–6) and the Space Shuttle taking off.

      Chapter One: The Dawn of Ideas – the Empirical Age

      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.

      A stone axe head and Clovis spear point, perhaps the earliest examples of refashioned natural materials.

      However, the development of engineered structures – and engineering per se – relied on need: the necessity to improve all aspects of the human condition, including the need for food, water, warmth, protection and a means of defence against predators and other humans. In no specific order or sequence, six essential tools, or engineered items, were developed.

      The precise order of application of these in terms of time is unknown, although some were given functional attributes as machines more than 2,500 years ago.

      1. The wedge or ramp

      2. The wheel and the central axle

      3. The screw

      4. The lever

      5. The pulley

      6. The crane

      Neolithic farmers designed for a new and more settled existence.

      The rudimentary tools and goods found in roundhouses fabricated from wattle and daub – techniques developed through abstract thinking.

      Archimedes and his legacy

      The best known architect of one of the earliest machines was Archimedes (288–212 bc) and his famous screw, developed in the 3rd century bc. This was applied to a wide range of tasks throughout the world and, in some countries, remains to this day the primary means of lifting water from one level to another. Archimedes bequeathed a device that was directly responsible for the replacement of sail with steam, through propelling ships through one fluid – water – and propelling aeroplanes through another – air. Thus did the Archimedean screw connect the 3rd century bc to the 21st century ad and in so doing aid in the development of machines, albeit ones with limits defined by the balance of forces and not the application for work, defined as the trade between force and distance.

      What Archimedes also did was to explore the opportunities in mechanical advantage offered by the lever – work that inspired later Greeks to further define the various applications with a lever, windlass, pulley, wedge and screw. But all of these applications avoided the dynamics of working machines and merely defined and exploited the static balance of force in simple machines.

      The Archimedean screw as applied to a combine harvester in an integrated machine built on empirical principles.

      Names to Know: Creators Of The First Machines

      Archimedes (288–212

      bc

      )

      Hero of Alexandria (

      ad

      10–70)

      Zhang Heng (

      ad

      78–139)

      What is a machine?

      The technical definition of a simple machine is one in which the amount of power coming out (Fout) is equal to the force applied going in (Fin) and can be no greater. The mechanical advantage is frequently obtained in such simple machines by multiplying the magnitude of force by a specific factor: MA = Fout/Fin.

      Clearly, a simple machine does not itself contain a source of energy other than that applied to input a force, and this defines the amount of work that it can do; without friction (or elasticity), this is known as an ideal machine. In these, due to the conservation of energy, the power output (Pout), as defined through a rate of energy output, is equal to the power input (Pin). The power output equals the velocity of the load (νout) multiplied by the load force (Pout = Fout νout-) just as the input from the power side of the applied force is also equal to the velocity of the input point (νin) multiplied by the applied force: Pin = Fout νin-. Therefore, Foutνout = Fin νin.

      Machines and monuments

      While we benefit from having Greek text to explain motivations and draw conclusions for defining essential principles of force and work, previous civilizations a thousand years earlier exercised their own applications; people of the ancient Near East and city states such as Mesopotamia and Babylon applied levers and balances. Indeed, applications date back 5,000 years as the first examples of machines were made to work in ways that had previously been impossible. In Britain, 4,500 years ago, these machines constituted levers and probably pulleys – perhaps even the yet-to-be invented Archimedean screw. The complex geometry of megalithic monuments in the British Isles of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age testify to the universal application of these simple machines during the dawn of the empirical age.

      Tools developed with surprising sophistication were employed for complex shaping tasks, gouging mortise cavities for tenon joints fashioned in quartz sandstone, or the silcrete (sarsen) blocks now seen on a grand scale at Stonehenge. Other stone tools were used to fashion tongue and groove joints to stabilize lintel blocks that were slotted together. The application of stone tools to shape and fashion blocks weighing up to 25 tonnes invokes the use of mauls, hammer-stones, levers and ramps – all applications of the simple machine – and may have involved cranes and pulleys.

      We cannot know for sure the level of machine application to the construction of giant structures but we do know that, 4,500 years ago, the Egyptians used levers, pulleys, wheels on axles, cranes, rollers and ramps, together with wedges, tooled shaping of natural materials and perhaps other machines to build the pyramids. And in fact, beginning around the time Stonehenge was being erected in the grand finale of its multi-faceted form, almost all the simple machines were either in use or were being introduced tentatively in dispersed civilizations across the known world.

      Mechanical principles underpinned the establishment of large megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge, with the movement and erection of multi-tonne boulders seemingly standard practice.

      Shaping and fashioning for aesthetic and purposeful applications, be it calendar or astronomical alignment, is a fine example of early empirical thinking.

      Machines and metalworking

      Simultaneous with the development of advanced tools and simple machines – which coalesced around farming and the need for irrigation, architectural constructions and military engines for warfighting purposes – ancient city-states in the Middle East began working in metals and other exotic materials. This was paralleled by the emergence of the Bronze Age in central and north-western Europe, from which would flow the Iron Age and the eventual manufacture of materials never found in nature. Such materials played an equally vital role in the development of advanced machines and shaped tools fabricated from the new materials.

      Indeed, the use of metals was significant in the fabrication of tools and simple machines. Noted for its dominance in Mesopotamia for more than 2,500 years, before its demise early in the 7th century, the Assyrian Empire is also known for its fine metalwork and use of iron weapons. The Assyrian people were the first to build war machines of a type that would endure into the European medieval period, most notably battering rams, siege engines and large catapults. These developments were paralleled by the Roman Republic and the later Roman Empire, which introduced a significant metalworking industry that accompanied their forces as they invaded foreign lands, and remain as a legacy in the cities that came in their wake.

      The application of an Archimedean screw at Huseby Bruk, Sweden, is testament to an age-old principle of mechanical engineering.

      Elsewhere, in the 1st century ad, Hero of Alexandria (ad 10–70) made the first steam-powered machine – the aeolipile or ‘wind ball’. This consisted of a spherical water container, mounted in such a way that it was free to spin and fitted with release spouts on diametrically opposite sides of the sphere. The aeolipile was placed over a fire so the water inside would heat up, producing steam that was expelled from the spouts and provided positive thrust, causing the container to rotate. Shortly afterwards, in China, the noted astronomer and scientist Zhang Heng (ad 78–139) perfected an improved water clock and went on to design a seismometer, in addition to a set of differential gears for chariots. These increasingly revolutionary devices, all simple machines, provided the impetus for the development of more complex and sophisticated devices over succeeding centuries. For example, of more aesthetic satisfaction than any practical use, the first organ was assembled in the 3rd century bc but was greatly advanced as a sophisticated musical instrument in the 8th century. These simple machines – the foundation of engineering – underlie the structure for humankind’s most creative skills and talents.

      Had the collapse of the Roman Empire not occurred in the 5th century, it is likely that the advent of modern science and engineering would have produced a greater proliferation of working devices, and there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that some innovative, albeit simple, machines would have been added to the inventory. As it was, as Europe entered the Middle Ages (5th–15th centuries), Western machine technology stalled for more than 1,000 years, while further and more dramatic advances in the use of simple machines occurred in the Middle East, India and China.

      Hero’s aeolipile demonstrated action and reaction before they were ever defined.

      Islamic innovation

      In what is now regarded as the Islamic Golden Age – roughly the end of the 6th century through the end of the 15th century – in the Middle East and throughout the Mediterranean world, great strides were made with simple machines and their evolution into what could be considered as mechanics, with applications in a new age of technology. This was in stark contrast to Western Europe, where there was little interest in maintaining the institutional infrastructure that had characterized the classical world of Greece and Rome. It can be postulated that had it not been for Islamic seats of learning and the entrenched belief among Muslims that knowledge was a precious gift to be nurtured and extended, much learning would have been lost. But it was not lost, and there was a gradual increase in mechanical use of simple machines, setting down the fundamental elements of basic mechanical principles.

      The list of inventions that came out of this Golden Age is impressive and constitutes an important link with the European renaissance in mechanical engineering that underpinned the development of scientific thinking and supplanted empirical design. They included the invention by the Persians in the 5th–9th centuries of the windmill and the wind pump, the latter being a derivative of the windmill used for raising water by way of a mechanical application of wind power. From India came the cotton gin in the 6th century, a mechanical device for separating fibres from cotton seeds that involved a relatively complex system of wheels, gears and levers. This required a significant degree of manufacturing of small and highly accurate components together with precision assembly, reliability and robust design – but it worked!

      The spinning wheel came into widespread use in the Middle East during the 11th century and, together with the cotton gin, created one of the first international industries, expanding on the trade and exchanges that had characterized the early expansion of toolmaking during the latter decades of the hunter-gatherer communities in Western Europe, and the introduction of farming and agriculture, growing crops and corralling livestock. This cross-fertilization, development and co-ordination of ideas and inventions would later be the catalyst for inspiring Western scientists and engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (17th–19th centuries).

      In fact, quite a few of these inventions adopting various combinations of simple machines fed down the centuries. Sticking with the cotton industry, the spinning jenny is one example of old technologies being used for increasingly mechanized processes, and played an important role as a precursor in the 18th century to a new industrial age – the age of the machines.

      Also from the Islamic world and key to the age of the machines came the invention of the crankshaft, for converting reciprocating motion into rotational motion; and the camshaft, for phasing the rise and fall of reciprocating devices in a timed or phased sequence. Both would be crucial in the design of the steam engine and for the reciprocating engine (internal combustion engine). They were each devised by Ismail al-Jazari (1136–1206) in 1206 and were widely used in time clocks and pumps throughout Mesopotamia.

      The development of interleaving elements of simple machines such as these extended further, however, into the first programmable devices. Surprisingly, as with the invention of the organ, this advancement also came as a result of the desire to reproduce music. In the 9th century, the first music sequencer was described in The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Devices, written by three Persian brothers – known as the Banū Mūsā – working in Baghdad, in modern-day Iraq. This written compilation describes an extraordinary range of devices, indicating the existence of an established catalogue of simple machines manipulated so as to repeat, or replicate, spontaneous actions. They included the music sequencer, an early precursor to the pianola, which operates on rolls of perforated paper, or the recording disc of the 19th century.

      The similarly titled The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, written in 1206 by Ismail al-Jazari (who cited the Banū Mūsā’s book as an influence), contains detailed drawings of a water-powered flute of extremely large proportions that was developed on a precursor concept postulated by the Banū Mūsā brothers. Al-Jazari also explained the workings of programmable robots operating on the automata principle, whereby cyclical repeating patterns are made to occur in synchronism with a clock mechanism or a recoil spring, repetitively reset by a cam follower.

      Recorded by al-Jazari, a classic example of integrated machine technology displayed in this water pump involving rotational and linear gears.

      An application of the water-powered perpetual flute as recorded in The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices by al-Jazari in 1206.

      Further evidence of the creative talents of post-Roman Arabic world in this complex and totally impractical elephant clock invented by al-Jazari.

      Names to Know: Persian creators of ‘ingenious devices’

      Banū Mūsā brothers (9th century)

      Su Song (1020–1101)

      Ismail al-Jazari (1136–1206)

      Chinese inventions

      In China, where so many applications of simple machines originated, came the first escapement built into an astronomical clock tower. Developed by Su Song (1020–1101) in the 11th century, this invention preceded by two centuries the first appearance of such a mechanism in the West. It is considered to be the world’s first analogue ‘computer’ since it operates on precisely the same principles as mechanical devices that were developed several centuries later. Su Song is also credited with designing and building the endless chain drive as a power transmitter.

      Commonly, inventions outpaced discoveries, with the latter sometimes informing the practical application of the former. One such example is the powder rocket, which was developed from an observation of the chemical properties of gunpowder used as a propellant. Rumour surrounds the origin of the powder rocket, with some writers claiming that the Chinese were using rockets in the 10th century, although no firm evidence exists until the 13th century when there are substantiated reports of ‘fire-arrows’ and ‘iron pots’, reportedly audible for 15 miles (25 km) as they struck the ground and exploded. From early primitive devices emerged a wide range of projectiles powered by gunpowder, with treatises and manuals appearing in the 14th century containing detailed descriptions and explanations of several military devices. In part thanks to these written works, the technology spread to neighbouring regions such as Laos and Korea, stimulating their eventual migration to Eastern Europe via the Mongols, who adopted them in their expeditions westward.

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