Exploring Engineering

"Exploring Engineering" was developed to meet the need for a better way to introduce incoming engineering students to the fundamental concepts at the heart of all engineering disciplines. It was also created to show students in a vivid way, the great array of opportunities and possibilities of today's engineering fields from classical mechanical engineering to bioengineering and mechatronics. This is the first text to introduce nearly all of the major engineering areas, and to do so with a strong interdisciplinary case study approach. This approach better prepares and enables students to draw upon knowledge not only from their own particular field of expertise, but also from related or even distantly related engineering and technical and scientific fields, allowing them to become more versatile within their future employment. "Exploring Engineering" is flexible enough to offer a variety of approaches to the introduction of modern engineering for new students, while still providing the most important essentials that hold all engineering disciplines together, particularly the mathematical, quantitative basis of engineering as well as the modern computer tools that make today's engineering design so efficient and accurate. It introduces the fundamental physical, chemical, and material foundations for all engineering work, including motion, force, conservation of energy and matter. It explains the workings of simple electrical circuits, computer logic, control and mechatronics, stress/strain diagrams, bioengineering, stoichiometry. It offers applications of engineering ethics using an extended case study metaphor: the modern automobile. It provides simple data spreadsheets and other analytical tools of the trade to introduce students to the concepts of theoretical and of empirical engineering. It presents the engineering design process using examples and assignments specifically aimed at helping to guide students and instructor through a hands-on design project. A companion web site will offer a complete solutions manual and a number of suggested head-to-head competitions for a final design project.