Section 21 of 21

Mechanical Engineering

Machine design, manufacturability, GD and T, failure theories, and HVAC

What the section holds

Mechanical design and analysis covering springs, bearings, gears and fasteners; manufacturability; geometric dimensioning and tolerancing; static loading failure theories; variable loading failure theories including fatigue; kinematics, dynamics and vibrations covering mechanisms and natural frequency; and an HVAC block.

Why it matters for your exam

This is the discipline section for Mechanical candidates. The failure theory and fatigue material is the part most often needed under time pressure, and the vibrations material here is what the mechanical specification pairs with dynamics.

How to navigate it

Remember that vibrations are here, not in the dynamics section, and that HVAC appears both here and inside thermodynamics as refrigeration and HVAC cycles. Knowing which of the two to open is worth practising.

Search terms that land here

fatigue | endurance limit | gear | GD&T | natural frequency

Subsections, in handbook order

These are the headings the handbook itself uses. The page number beside each is where it begins.

  • Mechanical Design and Analysisp433
  • Manufacturabilityp441
  • Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T)p444
  • Static Loading Failure Theoriesp448
  • Variable Loading Failure Theoriesp449
  • Kinematics, Dynamics, and Vibrationsp451
  • HVACp454

Disciplines that use this section

Practise finding it

26 drill items in the corpus have this section as their answer.

Start a round

Page numbers here are read from handbook version 10.5 (seventh printing, April 2025), which runs to 502 pages. NCEES revises the handbook and page numbers move with it, which is why the drill asks which section a topic lives in rather than which page. Check the version of your own copy, downloaded free from NCEES.