Description
Electrical engineers design systems that have two main objectives:
1. To gather,store,process,transport,and present information.
2. To distribute,store,and convert energy between various forms.
In many electrical systems, the manipulation of energy and the manipulation of information are interdependent.
For example,numerous aspects of electrical engineering relating to information are applied in weather prediction. Data about cloud cover,precipitation,wind speed, and so on are gathered electronically by weather satellites, by land-based radar stations,and by sensors at numerous weather stations. (Sensors are devices that convert physical measurements to electrical signals.)This information is transported by electronic communication systems and processed by computers to yield forecasts that are disseminated and displayed electronically.
In electrical power plants,energy is converted from various sources to electrical form. Electrical distribution systems transport the energy to virtually every factory, home,and business in the world,where it is converted to a multitude of useful forms, such as mechanical energy,heat,and light.
No doubt you can list scores of electrical engineering applications in your daily life. Increasingly,electrical and electronic features are integrated into new products.
Automobiles and truck sprovide justone example of this trend.The electronic content of the average automobile is growing rapidly in value. Auto designers realize that electronic technology is a good way to provide increased functionality at lower cost.
Table 1.1 shows some of the applications of electrical engineering in automobiles.
As another example, we note that many common household appliances con-You may nd it interesting to search the web for sites related to mechatronics. tain keypads for operator control, sensors, electronic displays, and computer chips, as well as more conventional switches, heating elements, and motors. Electronics have become so intimately integrated with mechanical systems that a new name, mechatronics,is beginning to be used for the combination.
Unfortunately, it would seem that too many engineers are not well equipped to design mechatronic products:
The world of engineering is like an archipelago whose inhabitants are familiar with their own islands but have only a distant view of the others and little communication with them. A comparable near-isolation impedes the productivity of engineers, whether their eld is electrical and electronics, mechanical, chemical, civil, or industrial. Yet modern manufacturing systems, as well as the planes, cars, computers, and myriad other complex products of their making, depend on the harmonious blending of many different technologies. (Richard Comerford, Mecha … what? IEEE Spectrum, August 1994)