In engineering, electromechanics combines electrical and mechanical processes. Mechanical engineering in this context refers to the larger discipline which includes chemical engineering, and other related disciplines. Electrical engineering in this context also encompasses software engineering, computer engineering, and other related fields. This refers to the three major engineering disciplines of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and civil engineering.voltage.
Devices which carry out electrical operations by using moving parts are known as electromechanical. Strictly speaking, a manually operated switch is an electromechanical component, but the term is usually understood to refer to devices such as relays, which allow a voltage or current to control other, isolated voltages and currents by mechanically switching sets of contacts, solenoids, by which a voltage can actuate a moving linkage, vibrators, which convert DC to AC with vibrating sets of contacts, etc. Before the development of modern electronics, electromechanical devices were widely used in complex circuits, including electric typewriters and teletypes, and up to the complexity of an electromechanical digital computer.
History of electromechances
Relays originated with telegraphy as electromechanical devices used to regenerate telegraph signals.
The Strowger switch, Panel switch and similar ones were widely used in early automated telephone exchanges. Crossbar switches were first widely installed in the middle 20th century in Sweden, the United States and Britain, and quickly spread to the rest of the world. The electromechanical television systems of the late 19th century were less successful.
Electric typewriters developed, up to the 1980s, as "power-assisted typewriters". They contained a single electrical component, the motor. Where the keystroke had previously moved a typebar directly, now it engaged mechanical linkages that directed mechanical power from the motor into the typebar. This was also true of the later IBM Selectric. At Bell Labs, in the 1940s, the Bell Model V computer was developed. It was an electromechanical relay-based device; cycles took seconds. In 1968 electromechanical systems were still under serious consideration for an aircraft flight control computer, until a device based on large scale integration electronics was adopted in the Central Air Data Computer.
Modern practice
Much equipment which for most of the 20th century would have used electromechanical devices for control, beginning from the last third of the century have come to use less expensive and more reliable integrated microcontroller circuits containing ultimately a few million transistors and a program to carry out the same task through logic, with electromechanical components only where moving parts, such as mechanical electric actuators, are a requirement. Such chips have replaced most electromechanical devices, are used in most simple feedback control systems, and appear in huge numbers in everything from traffic lights to washing machines.
See also
- Adding machine
- Automation
- Automatic transmission system
- Electric power conversion
- Electricity meter
- Enigma machine
- Kerrison Predictor
- Mechatronics
- Power engineering
- Relay
- Robotics
- SAW filter
- Stepping switch
- Solenoid valve
- Thermostat
- Torpedo Data Computer
- Unit record equipment
References
- Davim, J. Paulo, editor (2011) Mechatronics, John Wiley & Sons ISBN 978-1-84821-308-1 .
- Furlani, Edward P. (August 15, 2001). Permanent Magnet and Electromechanical Devices: Materials, Analysis and Applications. Academic Press Series in Electromagnetism. San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-269951-3. OCLC 47726317.
- Krause, Paul C.; Wasynczuk, Oleg (1989). Electromechanical Motion Devices. McGraw-Hill Series in Electrical and Computer Engineering. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-035494-4. OCLC 18224514.
