Suggested Revision for Applicants with Non-Engineering Background

This page offers guidance on basic engineering concepts that are essential to understanding and being able to handle wider qualtitative and quantitative energy issues. It is not meant to be exhaustive but a degree of familiarity with terms and concepts helps enormously with handling the MSc particularly in the early stages. For convenience these have been split into topic areas that would typically fall into electrical or mechanical engineering.

Electrical Engineering

Circuit theory

• Ohm's Law, Kirchoff's Laws
• DC circuit analysis
• Resistance, capacitance and inductance
• Complex numbers, use of phasors and phasor diagrams to solve AC circuits
• Real, reactive and apparent power; power factor and power factor correction

Three-phase circuits

• The per-unit system
• Power flows: the effects of real and reactive power transfers

Electromagnetics

• Magnetostatics: Ampere's Law, magnetomotive forces, reluctance
• Faraday’s Law
• The transformer: ideal transformer, losses, equivalent circuit of a real transformer

Electrical machines

• A.C. machines: rotating magnetic field
• Induction motor: construction, operation, slip, equivalent circuit, torque-speed curve, starting methods
• Synchronous machine: construction, equivalent circuit, performance

Textbooks

Any textbook with "electrical engineering" and/or "electrical machines" and/or "power systems" in the title will do. We use:

• S. J. Chapman, "Electric Machinery Fundamentals" (McGraw-Hill).
• S. J. Chapman, "Electric machinery and power systems fundamentals" (McGraw-Hill)
• Glover, Sarma, "Power System Analysis and Design" (Brooks/Cole)
• Sen, "Principles of Electrical Machines and Power Electronics" (Wiley)
• Weedy, Cory, "Electric Power Systems" (Wiley)

Mechanical Engineering

Fluid Mechanics

Properties of Fluids: Shear stress, viscosity, density, compressibility, surface tension, separation & wakes, steady/transient flow, laminar/turbulent flow, boundary layers, vortex shedding, drag force, Reynolds number, Strouhal number, pressure, variation of pressure with height, pressure measurements, forces on submerged surfaces, centre of pressure, centre of force, Continuity equation, Bernouilli’s equation and its application, momentum equation, energy losses, dimensional analysis.

Solid Mechanics

Forces and stresses, normal stress, shearing stress, normal strain, shearing strain, stress-strain diagram, Hooke's Law, modulus of elasticity, deformations of members under axial loading, plastic deformations, stress concentrations, factor of safety, fatigue, prismatic members in pure bending, shear and bending-moment diagrams, deflections of beams.

Dynamics

Kinematics of particles, rectilinear and curvilinear motion of particles, velocity and acceleration, kinetics of particles, Newton’s Laws, principle of work and energy, kinetic and potential energy, conservation of energy, principle of impulse and momentum, linear angular momentum and conservation of momentum, centre of gravity, moment of inertia, vibration, natural frequency calculations.

Textbooks

• I. Granet, Fluid mechanics, 4th ed., Prentice Hill, 1996.
• J. F. Douglas and R. D. Matthews, Solving problems in Fluid mechanics, 3rd ed., Longman Group, 1996.
• E. J. Hearn, Mechanics of materials : an introduction to the mechanics of elastic and plastic deformation of solids and structural components, 2nd ed., Pergamon Press, 1985.
• J. L. Meriam and L. G. Kraige, Engineering mechanics - Statics, 5th ed., Wiley, 2003.
• J. L. Meriam and L. G. Kraige, Engineering mechanics - Dynamics, 3rd ed., Wiley, 1993.