4
A. Ghosh
POTENTIAL ENERGY,
CHEMICAL ENERGY
PRIME MOVER
FUNCTIONAL
MECHANISM
USEFUL
WORK
Hydraulic
Turbines
Wind mills
Steam engines
Steam Turbines
IC engines
Gas Turbines
Such systems
are practically of
limitless types
Electric Power generation
Transportation
Material handling & pumping
Manufacturing
Refrigeration & AC
Printing
Textile
Agriculture etc.
Thermodynamics
Fluid Mechanics
Heat Transfer
Mechanisms
Dynamics
Control
Strength of Materials
Tribology
Material Science
Fig. 1 Basic structure of mechanical engineering activities
conspicuously absent. Figure 2 shows this typical feature in old drawings of Europe.
The forest covers are missing as shown. This happened due to the famous ‘wood
famine’.
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, this famine resulted because of
excessive use of wood in all spheres of activities. Figure 3 shows the use of wood
in those centuries. Thus people started searching for coal as the fuel for heating
and other purposes. Soon the coal near the surface got exhausted, forcing people
to go deeper that resulted in the need of water pumping from deep mines. Besides,
pumping water to higher levels and then getting various services from that raised
Fig. 2 Typical landscape of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe