Mechanical Engineers Handbook Volume 2 – 4th Edition

The second volume of the fourth edition of the Mechanical Engineers’ Handbook is comprised of two parts: Part 1, Mechanical Design, with 14 chapters, and Part 2, Instrumentation, Systems, Controls and MEMS, with 11 chapters. The mechanical design chapters were in Volume I in the third edition. Given the introduction of 6 new chapters, mostly on measurements, in Volume I in this edition, it made sense to move the mechanical design chapters to Volume II and to cull chapters on instrumentation to make way for the measurements chapters, which are of greater use to readers of this handbook. Moreover, the mechanical design chapters have been augmented with 4 chapters (updated as needed) from my book, Environmentally Conscious Mechanical Design, thereby putting greater emphasis on sustainability.

The 4 chapters are Design for Environment, Life-Cycle Design, Design for Maintainability, and Design for Remanufacturing Processes. They flesh out sustainability issues that were covered in the third edition by only one chapter, Product Design and Manufacturing Processes for Sustainability. The other 9 mechanical design chapters all appeared in the third edition. Six of them have been updated. In the second part of Volume 2, Instrumentation, Systems, Controls and MEMS, 5 of the 11 chapters were new to the third edition of the handbook, including the 3 chapters I labeled as “new departures”: Neural Networks in Control Systems, Mechatronics, and Introduction to Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS): Design and Application.

These topics have become increasingly important to mechanical engineers in recent years and they are included again. Overall, 3 chapters have been updated for this edition. In addition, I brought over the Electric Circuits chapter from the ffth edition of Eshbach’s Handbook of Engineering Fundamentals. Readers of this part of Volume 2 will also fnd a general discussion of systems engineering; fundamentals of control system design, analysis, and performance modifcation;
and detailed information about the design of servo actuators, controllers, and general-purpose control devices. All Volume 2 contributors are from North America. I would like to thank all of them for the considerable time and effort they put into preparing their chapters.