Engineering↗
Traversing SolidWorks Assemblies and Feature Trees
Recursive component traversal through configurations and root components, walking the feature and sub-feature chain, filtering by type name, reading suppression states and repor…
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Engineering
Engineering articles and subject areas in the KEVOS knowledge library. 2237 pages.
All Engineering 2237Civil & Structural 53Mechanical 204Electrical 25Physics 14Engineering Mathematics 1543Computing & Software 21Manufacturing 129Materials 11Machine Design 168CAD 28Metrology 29Maintenance 3Welding 9
Engineering↗
Untethered: Digital Mobile Telephony, Satellite Positioning and the Smartphone
Three milestones that separated communication from place, made position and precise time a free service, and folded a dozen devices into one.
Engineering↗
Urban Water Engineering: Treatment, Sewerage and Elevated Storage
Three milestones between 1854 and 1860 established the modern urban water system: treat what comes in, separate and treat what goes out, and store enough head to survive a failure.
Engineering↗
Vee and Wedge Belt Drive Design
Designing a wedge belt drive: belt types, service factors, section selection, pulley pitch diameters, belt pitch length, exact centre distance, correction factors and the number…
Engineering↗
Water and Mud: Irrigation, Flood Control and the First Engineered Cities
Engineering begins as a response to water. Four milestones in levees, canals, urban drainage and bringing supply inside the walls.
Engineering↗
Water, Concrete and Scale: The Panama Canal, Hoover Dam and Prestressed Concrete
Three milestones showing what happens when concrete construction moves from large to unprecedented, and the governing parameter turns out to be hydrology, creep or heat rather t…
Engineering↗
Welded Joint Design
Designing butt and fillet welded joints: full penetration assumptions, leg length against throat thickness, allowable stress, and the weld-as-a-line method for direct, bending a…
Engineering↗
Working with Selected Objects in the SolidWorks API
Using the SOLIDWORKS selection manager: marks and ordering, identifying picked entities, adding mates, setting materials, driving dimension values, programmatic selection and se…
Engineering↗
Worm Gearboxes and Geared Motor Units
Selecting worm reduction gearboxes and geared motor units: nominal against actual ratio, load classification and service factor, mechanical against thermal rating, and the overh…
Engineering↗
Alloy Spring Steels
Chromium-vanadium (ASTM A231/A232, SAE 6150) and chromium-silicon (ASTM A401) spring wires — compositions, shock and temperature capability, supply conditions, and the prompt-he…
Engineering↗
Constant-Modulus Alloys
The special nickel and cobalt alloys whose elastic modulus barely changes with temperature — Iso-Elastic, Ni-Span C alloy 902, Elinvar, Elgiloy and Havar — plus the specialty ma…
Engineering↗
Copper-Base Spring Alloys
The three copper-base spring materials — spring brass, phosphor-bronze and beryllium-copper — with compositions, tensile strengths by temper and diameter, moduli, electrical con…
Engineering↗
Design Stresses and Fatigue
How to choose a safe working stress for a spring — fatigue theory, the three service classes and their cycle ranges, reading the recommended design-stress curves, the endurance …
Engineering↗
Flat High-Carbon Spring Steel Strip
Cold-rolled spring strip to ASTM A682 — the two steels that cover 95 % of flat springs, rolled tempers No. 5 to No. 1, mill-hardened T1–T3 strip with strength by thickness, edge…
Engineering↗
High-Carbon Spring Steels
The workhorse cold-coiled spring wires — music wire A228, hard-drawn A227 and A679, oil-tempered A229 and valve-quality A230 — with sizes, tensile ranges, moduli by diameter, el…
Engineering↗
Hot-Rolled Bars for Hot-Coiled Springs
Heavy springs are coiled red-hot from annealed bar. Carbon bars to ASTM A68/SAE 1095, the A331 alloy families 5160, 9260, 4150 and 8645–8660, tool steels for special cases, and …
Engineering↗
Metallurgy of Spring Steels
How spring steel is made — from ore, flux and coke through the blast furnace and basic-oxygen converter to killed ingots, billets, patented rod and cold-drawn wire — and what ea…
Engineering↗
Nickel-Base Spring Alloys
Monel 400 and K-500, Inconel 600 and X-750, and the minor nickel spring alloys — compositions, tensile strengths by diameter, the fall of modulus with temperature, service-tempe…
Engineering↗
Stainless Steel Wire and Strip
Spring stainless in three families — cold-worked austenitic 302/304/316, hardenable martensitic 414/420/431 and precipitation-hardening 17-7 PH — with properties, compositions, …
Engineering↗
Acme Screw Threads
The power-transmission thread: the trapezoidal Acme and Tr forms, the power-screw torque equations, a Tr30×6 jack worked in full — raising, lowering, efficiency and the self-loc…
Engineering↗
Adhesives and Sealants
Joining without holes: how adhesives hold and why surfaces decide, the shear-good-peel-bad design law with a lap joint worked to 4.69 kN, the chemistry shelf from epoxy to silic…
Engineering↗
Algebra and Equations
Rearranging formulas, essential identities, linear and simultaneous equations, quadratics and cubics, Newton–Raphson root finding, arithmetic and geometric progressions, binomia…
Engineering↗
Allowances and Tolerances for Fits
Limits and fits: why tolerances exist, the vocabulary of limits and deviations, clearance, transition and interference fits, the ISO grade system with the standard tolerance uni…
Engineering↗
Arbors, Chucks and Spindles
Holding the work and the tool: three-jaw, four-jaw and collet chucks and their runout, arbors for milling cutters, the spindle that drives them, and why gripping force falls wit…
Engineering↗
Ball and Acme Leadscrews
The screw as a machine axis: Acme in service and the recirculating ball screw side by side, the same five-kilonewton job priced on both bills — drive torque, holding duty, heat …
Engineering↗
Ball, Roller and Needle Bearings
Rolling replaces sliding: the catalogue family from deep-groove to taper and needle, the L10 life equation worked in hours with its brutal cube law, the statistics of rolling fa…
Engineering↗
Bevel Gears
Bevel gears for intersecting shafts: pitch cones and cone angles, straight versus spiral bevel, cone distance, the back-cone or Tredgold approximation and equivalent teeth, mitr…
Engineering↗
British Fasteners
The British thread systems and their legacy: the Whitworth 55-degree form with its rounded crests, BSW and BSF, the metric-based British Association series, and British Standard…
Engineering↗
Broaches and Broaching
Broaching a finished form in a single pass: the broach as a bar of progressively taller teeth, the rise per tooth that sets how much each removes, tooth pitch and cutting force,…
Engineering↗
Buttress Threads
The one-way thread: the asymmetric 7°/45° form, the flank-angle arithmetic showing buttress cuts nut-bursting force 4.7 times below the 60° vee while matching square-thread effi…
Engineering↗
Calculating Thread Dimensions
One dimension generates the whole thread: where the constants 0.6495, 1.0825, 1.2269 and 0.9382 come from in the 60° triangle, the working diameters of an M10×1.5 computed in fu…
Engineering↗
Cams
Cams and followers: the displacement diagram, the four standard motion laws (uniform velocity, simple harmonic, parabolic and cycloidal) compared by peak acceleration and smooth…
Engineering↗
Cap and Set Screws
Two fasteners with opposite jobs: the socket head cap screw that clamps at class 12.9 strength through a hex socket, and the headless set screw that locks a hub to a shaft by pr…
Engineering↗
Cemented Carbides
Cemented carbide cutting-tool material: tungsten carbide grains in a cobalt binder, how cobalt content trades hardness against toughness, the ISO application groups, coatings, a…
Engineering↗
CNC Numerical Control Programming
Programming computer numerical control machines: the coordinate systems and axes, G-codes and M-codes, setting spindle speed and feed from cutting data, linear and circular inte…
Engineering↗
Couplings, Clutches and Brakes
One friction physics, three jobs: couplings that join shafts for good, clutches that join them at will, and brakes that turn motion into heat — with the clutch torque line worke…
Engineering↗
Cutting Speeds and Feeds
Choosing the three cutting parameters — speed, feed and depth — and what each controls: tool life through speed, surface finish through feed and nose radius, and metal removal t…
Engineering↗
Cutting Tools
The fundamentals of metal cutting: single-point tool geometry, rake and clearance angles and the tool signature, cutting speed and how it sets spindle speed, material removal ra…
Engineering↗
Disc Springs
Belleville disc springs: cone geometry and the h/t ratio, the nonlinear force-deflection character with computed curves, series and parallel stacking arithmetic, friction and gu…
Engineering↗
Drafting Practices
Engineering drawing essentials: the drawing as a contract, first- and third-angle projection, line conventions, views and sections, dimensioning rules with datum-versus-chain ac…
Engineering↗
Electric Motors
The prime mover as a mechanical component: synchronous speed and slip, the induction motor's torque–speed curve with a 3 kW point worked, starting methods and the exact one-thir…
Engineering↗
Electrical Discharge Machining
Machining by spark erosion: how EDM removes metal with no cutting force so it cuts any conductive material however hard, the spark gap and overcut, electrode wear, the finish-ve…
Engineering↗
Elements, Heat, Mass and Weight
The physical starting points for materials work: density and how it turns a volume into a weight, specific heat and the energy to change temperature, thermal expansion, and wher…
Engineering↗
Engineering Economics
Money over time for engineering decisions: simple and compound interest, nominal and effective rates, cash-flow diagrams, equivalence factors with a computed 8% table, net prese…
Engineering↗
Estimating Speeds and Machining Power
Working out the power, torque and time a cut demands: specific cutting energy and power from metal removal rate, motor power through efficiency, cutting torque, and machining ti…
Engineering↗
Files and Burs
Hand and rotary shaping tools: single- and double-cut files and their coarseness grades, why a file is harder than the work, filing technique, and rotary burs with their high sp…
Engineering↗
Finishing
Treating a component's surface after machining: electroplating and Faraday's law of deposition, anodising, galvanising and sacrificial protection, organic and powder coatings, a…
Engineering↗
Flexible Belts and Sheaves
Grip is exponential: the capstan law worked flat and vee, the groove that multiplies friction three times over, a real drive priced in kilowatts, the timing belt that trades sli…