Almost all multidisciplinary engineering systems have significant mechanical content. The mechanical part is often the most determining factor for the final performance of the total mechatronic system.…
The key attributes of a mechanical system are inertia (mass and mass moment of inertia), compliance (springiness), and energy dissipation (friction), and these attributes are distributed throughout the mechanical system. The variables used to describe mechanical system behavior are force (or torque) and velocity (or angular velocity), the product of which is power. The parasitic effects in mechanical systems include friction, backlash, compliance, and resonance.
Most machines are planar (two-dimensional) and consist of planar mechanisms (e.g., slider-crank and four-bar mechanisms); two-dimensional kinematics and kinetics are adequate for these machines. But to build dancing robots, self-driving vehicles, and rockets that can land on a platform in the ocean, knowledge of three-dimensional kinematics and kinetics is absolutely essential. Understanding and managing mechanical vibrations in a mechanical system is also essential: free and forced, damped and undamped, transient and steady-state, natural frequencies and modes of vibration, one- and two-degree-of-freedom systems.
This module addresses all these issues and topics. The engineer learns how to physically model real mechanical systems. Predicted dynamic behavior of the model is then obtained through the application of the Laws of Nature to the physical model and the solution, both analytically and numerically, of the resulting equations of motion.
