Welcome to Mechanical Engineering

Mechanical engineering is a broad engineering discipline concerned with analyzing, designing, manufacturing, building, controlling, and improving machines, products, processes, and technical systems. Doing this at an academic level requires a strong understanding of the physical principles, materials, components, and systems that determine how these products and machines behave. This requires subjects such as mathematics, mechanics, dynamics, materials science, manufacturing, control engineering, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics. Many real mechanical-engineering problems cannot yet be analyzed completely with the knowledge available to a starting first-year student. The problems introduced in this course therefore return later in the program, where they are studied in greater depth as your knowledge and engineering skills develop.

The Mechanical Engineering program at Eindhoven University of Technology is challenging, because modern mechanical engineers must be able to connect theory with design and realization. Lectures develop the fundamental knowledge and skills, while Challenge-Based Learning projects require you to combine and apply that knowledge in realistic engineering problems.

A central theme throughout the program is that an engineering idea must ultimately become a functioning physical system. Manufacturing and realization are therefore essential: a design must be manufacturable, testable, reliable, and suitable for production. At the same time, advanced robotics and autonomous systems are increasingly important examples of modern mechanical engineering, bringing together mechanics, dynamics, sensing, actuation, control, software, and manufacturing in a single integrated system.

This combination of fundamentals, design, manufacturing, experimentation, and system integration provides a broad mechanical-engineering education and prepares graduates for a wide range of roles in high-tech industry, manufacturing, robotics, energy, mobility, healthcare, and research.

Fig. 1 Prof. Dr. Ir. P.D. Anderson, responsible lecturer for the course Introduction to Mechanical Engineering
Dean of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology.