Ask any electronics hobbyist or professional what the simplest building blocks of electronic circuits are, and they’ll undoubtedly say resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Ask a mechanically-inclined person the same question about their field and the answer will probably be less straightforward. Springs would make the list for sure, but then… hmm. Maybe gears? 80/20 aluminum extrusions?
As it turns out, there are a handful of fundamental building blocks in the mechanisms world, and they’re functionally very similar, and mathematically identical, to the Big Three found in electrical engineering.
Mechanical Equivalents
Before we look at the components themselves, let’s step back a moment and think about voltage and current. Voltage is a potential difference between two points in a circuit, sometimes called electromotive force (EMF). It turns out that EMF is an apt term for it, because it is roughly analogous to, well, force. Voltage describes how “hard” electrons are being “pushed” in a circuit. In much the same vein, current describes the rate of electric charge flow.
Now that we’ve got that squared away, let’s break down what each of the three popular passives actually does, starting with the humble resistor. Resistors convert voltage to current — that is, the voltage potential across a resistor is proportional to the current flowing through it, and vice versa. To put it in terms we discussed above, the flow of electrons traveling through the element is proportional to the force that it exerts back onto the circuit. It resists the flow of electrons by pushing back harder when they flow faster.
There’s a mechanical element that behaves in exactly the same way — the dashpot or damper. A dashpot is often a fluid-filled cylinder with a piston the liquid can flow past, and it push ..
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