Brief Description on the Mechanical Engineering Modelling MSc Program
at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME)
'One designed by a civil engineer starts moving that is bad; one designed by a mechanical engineer does not move that is bad, too. Mechanical engineers should design machines that move.'
This course deals with those time-dependent problems of mechanical engineering, which typically require the efficient modeling of these tasks in order to access the continuously developing methods of computational engineering. Modern computational methods are very popular since they show their easy-to-use interface for engineers. This often causes misunderstanding and disappointment during the naive applications of engineering software. Computational methods are reliable if they are properly tested and the principles of their applied algorithms and procedures are understood. This is analogous to the modern cartoon industry: the 25 pictures of one second of a cartoon can be drawn by computers if the first and the last picture of that second are designed for them by the artist but the computers will totally fail if they have to draw the cartoon without any reference picture, or based on the first (or last) picture only.
The tasks of mechanical engineers that typically require the modeling of machines in motion and that of time-varying processes are based on solid and fluid mechanics, thermodynamics and electronics. Modeling means the understanding and active application of the related theories, which are supported by differential equations and numerical methods in mathematics. Modeling needs also experimental work during the research-development-innovation process in case engineers do not have enough information about the motions and processes they want to capture by a model. Finally, modeling is also affected by the engineers knowledge in design, technology, and informatics, since the model should not be so complex that the available software is unable to solve them within reasonable time and for reasonable cost.