What do Mechanical Engineers design?

Mechanical engineers have an enormous range of opportunity and their education mirrors this breadth of subjects. Students concentrate on one area while strengthening analytical and problem-solving skills applicable to any engineering situation.

Disciplines within mechanical engineering include but are not limited to:

Acoustics Aerospace Automation Automotive Autonomous Systems Biotechnology Composites Computer Aided Design (CAD) Control Systems Cyber security

Design Energy Ergonomics Human health Manufacturing and additive manufacturing Mechanics Nanotechnology Production planning Robotics Structural analysis

Technology itself has also shaped how mechanical engineers work and the suite of tools has grown quite powerful in recent decades. Computer-aided engineering (CAE) is an umbrella term that covers everything from typical CAD techniques to computer-aided manufacturing to computer-aided engineering, involving finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). These tools and others have further broadened the horizons of mechanical engineering.

What careers are there in mechanical engineering?

Society depends on mechanical engineering. The need for this expertise is great in so many fields, and as such, there is no real limit for the freshly minted mechanical engineer. Jobs are always in demand, particularly in the automotive, aerospace, electronics, biotechnology, and energy industries.

Here are a handful of mechanical engineering fields.

In statics, research focuses on how forces are transmitted to and throughout a structure. Once a system is in motion, mechanical engineers look at dynamics, or what velocities, accelerations and resulting forces come into play. Kinematics then examines how a mechanism behaves as it moves through its range of motion.

Materials science delves into determining the best materials for different applications. A part of that is materials strength — testing support loads, stiffness, brittleness and other properties — which is essential for many construction, automobile, and medical materials.

How energy gets converted into useful power is the heart of thermodynamics, as well as determining what energy is lost in the process. One specific kind of energy, heat transfer, is crucial in many applications and requires gathering and analyzing temperature data and distributions.