Engineering Principles in Everyday Life for Non-Engineers (Synthesis Lectures on Engineering)

This book is about the role of some engineering principles in our everyday lives. Engineers study these principles and use them in the design and analysis of the products and systems with which they work. The same principles play basic and influential roles in our everyday lives as well. Whether the concept of entropy, the moments of inertia, the natural frequency, the Coriolis acceleration, or the electromotive force, the roles and effects of these phenomena are the same in a system designed by an engineer or created by nature. This shows that learning about these engineering concepts helps us to understand why certain things happen or behave the way they do, and that these concepts are not strange phenomena invented by individuals only for their own use, rather, they are part of our everyday physical and natural world, but are used to our benefit by the engineers and scientists. Learning about these principles might also help attract more and more qualified and interested high school and college students to the engineering fields. Each chapter of this book explains one of these principles through examples, discussions, and at times, simple equations.

Saeed Benjamin Niku is a professor of mechanical engineering at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo, California. He has taught courses in mechanics, robotics, design, and creativity, and has been involved in the design of many products, including many assistive devices for the disabled and new robotic devices. Dr. Niku's publications include a statics workbook, an introduction to robotic analysis book (in its second edition), and a creative design of products and systems book. He enjoys making furniture and utilitarian products as well as artistic artifacts with wood, metals, glass, leather, and other materials.

He received a B.S. mechanical engineering from Tehran Polytechnic in 1975, an M.S. mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 1976, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Davis in 1982.

Dr. Niku is a licensed professional engineer in the State of California.