Electromechanical engineering

In engineering, electromechanics combines electrical and mechanical processes and procedures drawn from electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. Electrical engineering in this context also encompasses electronics engineering.

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 which involve an electrical signal to create mechanical movement, or mechanical movement to create an electric signal. Often involving electromagnetic principles such as in relays, which allow a voltage or current to control other, usually isolated circuit voltage or current by mechanically switching sets of contacts, and solenoids, by which a voltage can actuate a moving linkage as in solenoid valves. Piezoelectric devices are electromechanical, but do not use electromagnetic principles. Piezoelectric devices can create sound or vibration from an electrical signal or create an electrical signal from sound or mechanical vibration.

Before the development of modern electronics, electromechanical devices were widely used in complicated systems subsystems, including electric typewriters, teleprinters, clocks, very early television systems, and the very early electromechanical digital computers.

Relays originated with telegraphy as electromechanical devices used to regenerate telegraph signals. In 1885, Michael Pupin at Columbia University taught mathematical physics and electromechanics until 1931.

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