Micron-scale mechanical components such as springs, gears, fluidic and heat transfer devices are fabricated from a variety of substrate materials such as silicon, glass and polymers like SU8. Examples of MEMS components are the accelerometers that are used as car airbag sensors, modern cell phones, gyroscopes for precise positioning and microfluidic devices used in biomedical applications. Friction stir welding, a new type of welding, was discovered in 1991 by The Welding Institute (TWI). The innovative steady state (non-fusion) welding technique joins materials previously un-weldable, including several aluminum alloys. It plays an important role in the future construction of airplanes, potentially replacing rivets Composites or composite materials are a combination of materials which provide different physical characteristics than either material separately. At the smallest scales, mechanical engineering becomes nanotechnology—one speculative goal of which is to create a molecular assembler to build molecules and materials via mechanosynthesis
Finite Element Analysis is a computational tool used to estimate stress, strain, and deflection of solid bodies. It uses a mesh setup with user-defined sizes to measure physical quantities at a node. The more nodes there are, the higher the precision. Biomechanics is the application of mechanical principles to biological systems, such as humans, animals, plants, organs, and cells. Biomechanics also aids in creating prosthetic limbs and artificial organs for humans. Computational fluid dynamics, usually abbreviated as CFD, is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical methods and algorithms to solve and analyze problems that involve fluid flows.