The American Engineers' Council for Professional Development (ECPD, the predecessor of ABET ABET History ) has defined engineering as follows: [1] he creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property. Science, Volume 94, Issue 2446, pp. 456: Engineers' Council for Professional Development Engineers' Council for Professional Development. (1947). Canons of ethics for engineers Engineers' Council for Professional Development definition on Encyclopaedia Britannica (Includes Britannica article on Engineering) One who practices engineering is called an engineer , and those licensed to do so may have more formal designations such as European Engineer, Professional Engineer, Chartered Engineer, or Incorporated Engineer.
Similarly, in addition to military and civil engineering the fields then known as the mechanic arts became incorporated into engineering.
These disciplines concern themselves with differing areas of engineering work. Although initially an engineer will be trained in a specific discipline, throughout an engineer's career the engineer may become multi-disciplined, having worked in several of the outlined areas. Historically the main Branches of Engineering are categorized as follows: Imperial College London England : Studying engineering at Imperial: Engineering courses are offered in five main branches of engineering: aeronautical, chemical, civil, electrical and mechanical. There are also courses in computing science, software engineering, information systems engineering, materials science and engineering, mining engineering and petroleum engineering.
These new specialties sometimes combine with the traditional fields and form new branches such as Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics and Electrical and Computer Engineering. A new or emerging area of application will commonly be defined temporarily as a permutation or subset of existing disciplines; there is often gray area as to when a given sub-field becomes large and/or prominent enough to warrant classification as a new "branch." One key indicator of such emergence is when major universities start establishing departments and programs in the new field.
The study of failed products is known as forensic engineering, and can help the product designer in evaluating his or her design in the light of real conditions. The discipline is of greatest value after disasters, such as bridge collapses, when careful analysis is needed to establish the cause or causes of the failure.
The few types of engineering that are minimally constrained by such issues are pro bono engineering and open design engineering.
Every product or construction used by modern society will have been influenced by engineering design. Engineering design is a very powerful tool to make changes to environment, society and economies, and its application brings with it a great responsibility, as represented by many of the Engineering Institutions codes of practice and ethics.
Just a few examples of this from different engineering disciplines are the development of nuclear weapons, the Three Gorges Dam, the design and use of Sports Utility Vehicles and the extraction of oil. There is a growing trend amongst western engineering companies to enact serious Corporate and Social Responsibility policies, but many companies do not have these.
For example, in Canada it ranks as one of the public's most trusted professions. , pg. 2, The occupations most-trusted by Canadians, according to a poll by Leger Marketing... Engineering 88 per cent of respondents..
Consequently, a relatively small minority of engineers in the United States are actually licensed; this is of growing concern to some engineering organizations who believe licensure is important for maintaining the status of engineering as an elite and learned profession like medicine and law. However, becoming a "Registered Professional Engineer" or "P.E." is still often pursued as a professional credential for prestige, even when not actually required for particular employment.
In the United States, each state tests and licenses Professional Engineers. Currently most states do not license by specific engineering discipline, but rather provide generalized licensure, and trust engineers to use professional judgment regarding their individual competencies; this is the favored approach of the professional societies. Despite this, however, at least one of the examinations required by most states is actually focused on a particular discipline; candidates for licensure typically choose the category of examination which comes closest to their respective expertise.
The engineering institutions of the UK are some of the oldest in the world, and provide accreditation to many engineers around the world. In Canada the profession in each province is governed by its own engineering association. For instance, in the Province of British Columbia an engineering graduate with 4 or more years of experience in an engineering-related field will need to be registered by the Association for Professional Engineers and Geoscientists (APEGBC) APEGBC - Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of BC in order to become a Professional Engineer and be granted the professional designation of P.Eng.
Scientists may also have to complete engineering tasks, such as designing experimental apparatus or building prototypes. Conversely, in the process of developing technology engineers sometimes find themselves exploring new phenomena, thus becoming, for the moment, scientists.
Examples are the use of numerical approximations to the Navier-Stokes equations to describe aerodynamic flow over an aircraft, or the use of Miner's rule to calculate fatigue damage. Second, engineering research employs many semi-empirical methods that are foreign to pure scientific research, one example being the method of parameter variation.
Conversely, some engineering disciplines view the human body as a biological machine worth studying, and are dedicated to emulating many of its functions by replacing biology with technology. This has led to fields such as artificial intelligence, neural networks, fuzzy logic, and robotics.
Medicine, in part, studies the function of the human body. The human body, as a biological machine, has many functions that can be modeled using Engineering methods.
Source: Wikipedia > Engineering
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