Mechanical engineering
Mechanical Engineering is an extremely diverse and exciting discipline, filled with career opportunities. Mechanical engineers are masters of energy, motion, forces, solids, liquids and gases and numbers.
What is Mechanical Engineering?
Mechanical engineers design, build, test and maintain all manner of machines in all manner of places. This field covers virtually all areas of development and production, including:
- Analysis
- Design
- Development
- Manufacturing
- Operation
- Maintenance
What do Mechanical Engineers do?
The skills learned as a mechanical engineer are applicable across multiple industries including motor vehicle development, aircraft and ship construction, propulsion design, power plants and robotics.
Depending on your area of interest, you can apply these skills to any number of sub-disciplines of Mechanical Engineering. These include:
- Power Generation
- Noise & Vibration Control
- Flow Analysis & Measurement
- Transport
- Design & Simulation
- Composite Structures
- Building Services
- Consulting
- Infrastructure
- Acoustics
- Medical Devices
If it’s a machine, a mechanical engineer would have been involved with designing it, constructing a prototype, testing it, perfecting it and rolling it out on the production line. Some mechanical engineers may even be involved in marketing or selling it.
Mechanical Engineering careers
A mechanical engineer might work in the automotive industry, aerospace and transport industries, power generation, refineries, insurance industries, building services, railway systems design, consumer goods design and production and management consultancies.
Here’s a list of some of the tasks they might be called upon to do:
- Design vehicles, ranging from spacecraft to high-performance racing cars
- Analyse the acoustics data for planning a building
- Design a ventilation and air conditioning system for a large building
- Design the air-filtration unit for a train
- Design a suitable power system
- Design and develop next generation machines for aiding the disabled
- Develop new concepts for underground mining machinery and transport
- Use fluid structure interaction models to design rotating blades using advanced materials
- Design and manufacture industrial robots for a range of applications.