Hello everyone! I hope you are all looking after yourselves and finding time to do what you love and improve a little bit every day! Welcome to the penultimate Mechanical Engineering blog of 2024 (man, this year is going fast). Not long till exams now so I hope you are all looking to wrap up you assignments early so you can crack on with some exam prep 👀In this blog, I’ll tell you a little bit about what I’m studying in sem 2 this year and give you some insight into what you can expect if/when you choose mechanical!!
ENGGEN 204 – Professional Skills and Communication
All engineers do this paper so I won’t spend too much time on it. It’s a course centred around teamwork and group assignments where you expand on a plethora of skills essential for when we enter a professional engineering environment.
MECHENG 236 – Design and Manufacture II
This design course follows on from MECHENG 235, which I touched on in Blog #2. This course revolves around a 12 week group project. This year (and likely for you guys next year as well), the project is the Personal Urban Transport Vehicle Project where you design and fully specify a 3-wheeled urban vehicle. This has definitely been my favourite course this sem especially learning about the major components of cars such as brakes, clutches and internal combustion engines. You work in a group of 4 for the project and each of you are assigned a sub-system of the car. I was assigned the hydraulic tilting system that leans the vehicle around corners. The final report is due in 5 days so it’s gonna be a grind ngl. Here’s a screenshot of a hydraulic actuator assembly which I’ve only just finished today. ⬇️
MECHENG 222 – Dynamics
This course follows on from the dynamics section of ENGGEN 121. The techniques and approaches taught in this course are a little confusing at first as it’s quite theoretical but after some time, the usefulness of what is taught becomes apparent. The structure of the course is fairly similar to ENGGEN 121 in that you cover kinematics and kinetics of both particles and rigid bodies as well as touching on brand new topics such as vibration. And good news, Hazim teaches half of this course!
MECHENG 211 – Thermofluids
211 teaches you a wide variety of fluid/thermo concepts that are essential for mechanical engineers. The first topic is thermodynamics which starts off feeling a little bit like 140. Thermodynamics involves a lot of reading tables which you will get used to, don’t worry! The second topic is fluid mechanics which is probably the hardest part of the course, at least it was for me. You will learn the Bernoulli equation which is like the god of all fluid mechanics equations. The final topic which is what us second-years are doing right now is heat transfer which is so different to what you would expect. So far, we’ve covered the concepts of conduction, convection and radiation in detail as well as thermal resistance networks and finned surfaces. I know this probably won’t mean much to most of you!
Let me know if you have any questions about these courses, I’m happy to help!!
See you in a couple weeks for the final blog of 2024. Happy running!
Rohan