Fundamentals of Engineering
Full course description
This course introduces fundamentals of engineering. It provides an overview of various engineering fields with a specific focus on the open-ended and multidisciplinary nature of typical engineering problems and the underlying scientific principles.
The students familiarize with the engineering design cycle, which consists of formulating a problem, setting design requirements, generating several concepts, selecting the optimal solution, realizing it.
The course focusses on underlying scientific principles and laws related to basic engineering fields. Principles and laws in the field of current, force, energy and power that a broad range of engineers need in their basic knowledge portfolio, also including the future circular engineer. Exercises are included in the course to let students apply and calculate on these principles and laws as is expected of engineers.
The course prepares students for later courses in which they continue the development of their circular engineering skills. In this light, students need to perform this with an understanding of the environmental impact, but also the academic environment as well as ethics, safety and sustainability aspects.
Course objectives
At the end of this course, you are able to:
- Understand and explain basic engineering principles more specific:
Laws of Newton, Ohm, mass, momentum, energy and electric charge conservation, Coulomb, Fourier, Hooke, Fick, ideal gas; the principles of Archimedes, Bernoulli
Elementary modelling involving setting of preconditions, identification of most important scientific principle, sources of losses, deviations and errors
- Analyse principles of physics and engineering and perform basic calculations with characteristic examples in each engineering field
- Apply the design engineering cycle to solve a problem
- Reproduce knowledge on the generic engineering design cycle
- Develop teamwork participating as an active member of a team
Recommended reading
Only topics of lectures and tutorials need to be studied.
- Moaveni S. (2020). Engineering Fundamentals: An Introduction to Engineering, SI Edition. Cengage Learning, 6th edition, ISBN 978-0-357-11215-1. (The library has 2 copies in stock that can be consulted in the library only.)
- Khandani S (2005), Engineering design process.