Mechanical engineering is a field of engineering that deals with the design, construction, and operation of machines and mechanical systems. It involves the application of physics and materials science for the analysis, design, manufacturing, and maintenance of mechanical systems. This can include everything from simple machines, such as gears and levers, to complex systems, such as power plants and aircraft.
Course Content
Mechanical Engineering
Mechanical engineering is a field of engineering that deals with the design, construction, and operation of machines and mechanical systems. It involves the application of physics and materials science for the analysis, design, manufacturing, and maintenance of mechanical systems.
For anything Mechanical Engineering related that doesn’t require its own separate discussion.
What does your license plate say about you? In the United States, more than 9 million vehicles carry personalized “vanity” license plates, in which preferred words, digits, or phrases replace an otherwise random assignment of letters and numbers to identify a vehicle. While each state and the District of Columbia maintains its own rules about appropriate selections, creativity reigns when choosing a unique vanity plate. What’s more, the stories behind them can be just as fascinating as the people who…
We’ve all had the unpleasant experience of walking into a bathroom to discover a messy toilet seat. Now, an MIT alumni-founded startup is working to flush away that problem forever. Cleana, co-founded by CTO Richard Li SM ’24, has developed an antibacterial, self-lifting toilet seat that promises a cleaner, more hygienic bathroom experience for all. Developing a new toilet seat is not quite as sexy as creating a fusion reactor, but Li believes in the importance of the company’s mission.…
Neural networks have made a seismic impact on how engineers design controllers for robots, catalyzing more adaptive and efficient machines. Still, these brain-like machine-learning systems are a double-edged sword: Their complexity makes them powerful, but it also makes it difficult to guarantee that a robot powered by a neural network will safely accomplish its task. The traditional way to verify safety and stability is through techniques called Lyapunov functions. If you can find a Lyapunov function whose value consistently decreases,…
Foundation models are massive deep-learning models that have been pretrained on an enormous amount of general-purpose, unlabeled data. They can be applied to a variety of tasks, like generating images or answering customer questions. But these models, which serve as the backbone for powerful artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, can offer up incorrect or misleading information. In a safety-critical situation, such as a pedestrian approaching a self-driving car, these mistakes could have serious consequences. To help prevent such…
Microbes that are used for health, agricultural, or other applications need to be able to withstand extreme conditions, and ideally the manufacturing processes used to make tablets for long-term storage. MIT researchers have now developed a new way to make microbes hardy enough to withstand these extreme conditions. Their method involves mixing bacteria with food and drug additives from a list of compounds that the FDA classifies as “generally regarded as safe.” The researchers identified formulations that help to stabilize…
In 2012, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, died of post-surgery complications at the age of 82 following what should have been a routine heart surgery. Armstrong had undergone bypass surgery, the most common open-heart operation in the United States, and a surgery where the overall chance of death has dropped to almost zero. Armstrong’s death was caused by heart damage that occurred during the removal of temporary cardiac pacing leads. Pacing leads are routinely used to monitor patients and…
Titanium alloys are essential structural materials for a wide variety of applications, from aerospace and energy infrastructure to biomedical equipment. But like most metals, optimizing their properties tends to involve a tradeoff between two key characteristics: strength and ductility. Stronger materials tend to be less deformable, and deformable materials tend to be mechanically weak. Now, researchers at MIT, collaborating with researchers at ATI Specialty Materials, have discovered an approach for creating new titanium alloys that can exceed this historical tradeoff, leading…
The next time you cook pasta, imagine that you are cooking spaghetti, rigatoni, and seven other varieties all together, and they need to be separated onto 10 different plates before serving. A colander can remove the water — but you still have a mound of unsorted noodles. Now imagine that this had to be done for thousands of tons of pasta a day. That gives you an idea of the scale of the problem facing Brendan Smith PhD ’18, co-founder and…
In 2024, MIT granted tenure to 11 faculty members across the School of Engineering. This year’s tenured engineers hold appointments in the departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Chemical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS, which reports jointly to the School of Engineering and MIT Schwarzman College of Computing), Mechanical Engineering, and Nuclear Science and Engineering. “My heartfelt congratulations to the 11 engineering faculty members on receiving tenure. These faculty have already made a lasting impact…
Two films produced by MIT were honored with Emmy nominations by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Boston/New England Chapter. Both “We Are the Forest” and “No Drop to Spare” illustrate international conversations the MIT community is having about the environment and climate change. “We Are the Forest,” produced by MIT Video Productions (MVP) at MIT Open Learning, was one of six nominees in the Education/Schools category. The documentary highlights the cultural and scientific exchange of the MIT Festival Jazz…
