Professors Philip Krein and Patrick Chapman have a contract with Oxford University Press to write a new textbook on electromechanics. The title is Electromechanics: The Science and Engineering of Electrical Forces and Motion. This will be the new textbook for ECE 431. In the first half the authors are going back to the basics, as in H. H. Woodson and James R. Melcher’s Electromechanical Dynamics, Part I: Discrete Systems, published in 1968, giving a more generalized approach than the current text by A. E. Fitzgerald, C. Kingsley Jr., and S. D. Umans, Electric Machinery, now in its sixth edition. The latter text attempts to simplify the study of electromechanics for power engineers and focuses on steady-state power systems using old-style large-scale machines. Professors Krein and Chapman are broadening the scope and asking questions such as, “How does a disc drive work, an audio speaker, a microphone? How many electric machines are in an electric vehicle? How do you apply electromechanics to MEMS? What does a computing engineer need to know about electromechanics?”

In the second half of their new text, they are laying the groundwork for reconfiguring the design process by reversing the problem from analysis to design. A whole generation of designers is being lost as they are retiring. The old reference tables they used as design tools do not take into account new modeling tools. New designers need to be trained. With the proper groundwork, undergraduates can get some exposure to design.