Undergraduate BEng (Hons)
Mechanical Engineering
including a Foundation Year
Gain skills to build the product of the future.
Gain skills to build the product of the future.
Engineering has shaped modern society and personal lives in a way that no other discipline has. By studying Mechanical Engineering at Kent you gain the skills to make your own mark in this exciting field. Graduates can work at the forefront of the major areas of mechanical engineering, combining theory with practical and project work, turning ideas into real systems. Will you build the product of the future?
At Kent, you study all aspects of mechanical engineering, from 3D design to advanced manufacturing, control and mechatronic to advanced robotics and fluid dynamics to thermodynamic and heat transfer, preparing you for a career in any branch of mechanical engineering.
If you don’t have the right grades to enrol directly on to our BEng (Hons) Mechanical Engineering degree, you could opt to start your studies with our Foundation year. The extra year is intended to give you the best possible preparation for success on the degree pathway.
Experience the future of technology with robotics, AI, mechatronics, fluid dynamics and more.
Strong links with the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE).
First-class facilities to support your development with access to computer labs, mechanical workshop, engineering lab, anechoic chamber and more.
Tailor the course to match your interests and future career plans.
Take a placement year to help boost your professional skills and get paid to do it.
Our typical offer levels are listed below and include indicative contextual offers. If you hold alternative qualifications just get in touch and we'll be glad to discuss these with you.
DDD
Merit, Merit, Pass
72 tariff points from your IB Diploma, including Maths at 4 at HL or SL, typically H4, H4, H4 or equivalent.
Mathematics grade C
N/A
The University will consider applicants holding T level qualifications in subjects closely aligned to the course.
Obtain the Access to HE Diploma with a minimum of 45 credits at Level 3, with 9 credits at Distinction and 6 credits at Merit.
The following modules are what students typically study, but this may change year to year in response to new developments and innovations.
A solid grasp of algebra is a fundamental requirement for advanced study in any STEM subject. In this module, you'll study the foundational algebra and coordinate geometry required for Stage 1 entry into your chosen degree and explore why they are so vital to your subject area.
Your preparation for an engineering degree starts here. You'll develop general skills required to underpin your studies as well as beginning to gain knowledge specific to mechanical and electrical engineering. This will enable you to start using measurement instruments, understand forces, and work with fundamental electric circuits. Your practical laboratory and reporting skills will also be developed to support you throughout the degree and your professional life.
Experimental skills and an appreciation of how to evaluate experimental errors are essential to the practice of engineering. Therefore, in order to support you throughout your studies, you will learn how present and analyse experimental data, how to use experimental error analysis and reach conclusions based on the data.
Modern electronics is very often created around microcontrollers which are computers embedded into hardware. To bring you into this important area, you'll have a practical and easily accessible introduction to a microcontroller and its programming language.
Finally, as engineers perform most of their work in projects, you'll learn by doing a mini-project that can be either electronic, mechanical or bio-medical in nature depending on your preference. Bringing together the other things you’ve learnt in the module, you’ll get to build, test, and report on the operation of your project and make suggestions for its future improvement.
Calculus – the study of continuous change – is a pillar of advanced mathematics, with important applications in STEM and financial subjects. Calculus, and in particular differential equations, are central to real-life applications of mathematics in a wide variety of subject areas, ranging from physics and engineering to biology and finance.
In this module, you’ll develop your knowledge of mathematical functions to give you a solid foundation for understanding calculus and other advanced topics. You’ll then move on to study differential calculus and its applications, allowing you to quantify and model rates of change mathematically and consistently and find the gradient of any curve. Finally, you’ll look at integral calculus and differential equations, allowing you to find anti-derivatives and model real-life situations.
Your preparation for an engineering degree continues in this module. You'll develop further knowledge and new problem-solving skills relevant to both mechanical and electrical engineering. This will include topics in alternating current (a.c.) circuits, engineering electromagnetism, mechanical oscillations and vibrations and rotating mechanical systems. Further laboratory work will reinforce this knowledge.
Mathematics is the fundamental language of engineering, allowing complex ideas to be described, formulated and developed. This module gives you a strong foundation of key mathematical techniques and methods required by most other modules in our engineering courses.
Topics covered include complex numbers, calculus, linear algebra, statistics and probability. Throughout the module, you’ll tackle real-world engineering problems. These include the study of mechanical and electrical systems, the use of complex numbers and linear algebra for the analysis of electrical circuits and the use of statistics and probability in the analysis of experimental data.
Electronics underpins all of modern life, from everyday household items to the most sophisticated supercomputers. It enables devices such as ultra-low power wearable health monitors through to megawatt wind turbines.
You’ll begin your engineering journey by learning fundamental circuit analysis and fabrication skills. This will enable you to begin engineering project work right from your first year.
You’ll also explore the vital and trusted role that engineers play in supporting and transforming society and infrastructure. You’ll do this by demonstrating your ability to consider societal issues essential to modern professional engineering.
Programming underpins all facets of modern life, from basic software applications to complex artificial intelligence systems. It enables everything from simple mobile apps to large-scale enterprise solutions.
You'll embark on your programming journey here, mastering fundamental coding concepts and development skills. This foundation will empower you to dive into programming projects right from your first year through lectures, workshops and programming challenges.
You’ll also examine the pivotal role of programmers in shaping and advancing society by exploring ethical and societal considerations essential to contemporary professional programming.
The success of an engineering product relies on the combination of careful mechanical design, strategic material selection, and a deep understanding of mechanics. These elements collectively shape the product's performance, durability, and overall effectiveness, highlighting their essential role in the development of any successful engineering solution.
You'll learn how to develop an engineering drawing of a product using a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) system and choose the best materials from a wide range of available engineering materials for your designed components.
This material selection process depends on the mechanical analysis of a component under various loading scenarios, which you will learn in this module. This knowledge will enable you to start developing an engineering project from your first year of study and practise it throughout your degree.
To bring your engineering education to life, you’ll do a project in each year of study. In the Stage 1 project, you’ll gain hands-on experience, allowing you to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world problems. This will enhance your understanding of engineering principles and concepts.
Throughout this process, you will apply electronic and mechanical design skills and programming/software knowledge to describe and produce a physical solution in alignment with a technical specification. You are expected to acquire a foundational understanding of engineering hardware and software integration and verification.
The module progresses through lectures, workshops, labs, and tutorials with supervision and technical guidance. It aims to provide you with hands-on and problem-solving skills in the concepts introduced in the Term 1 and Term 2 modules.
Understanding the mechanics of materials and structures, including the relationship between stress and strain, is fundamental to engineering design. You will use this knowledge as a foundation for predicting and preventing failure mechanisms in materials and structures, ensuring the integrity and safety of engineered systems.
In the complex world of engineering, a thorough grasp of these principles is essential for crafting robust and reliable structures. You will learn about the definition of internal loads in a structure which will generate stress and strain in a material.
You will then learn about the relationship between stress and strain under various loading scenarios and how this relationship would work in designing a mechanical component or structure. Furthermore, you will learn how to use various characterisation tests to measure various properties of materials as and predict the failure of a material.
Engineers work in interdisciplinary teams to overcome the challenges of intelligent engineering systems. Smart engineering systems are not simple mechanical or electronic components, but the result of synergistic integration between mechanical engineering, electronics, computer science and control.
You’ll learn to apply this interdisciplinary approach to develop innovative solutions that would not be possible with a single-discipline focus. You’ll gain applied knowledge of sensors, actuators, and data acquisition techniques which are crucial to modern engineering. After mastering the foundational concepts, you’ll progress to cover transducers, mechanical components and modelling of mechatronic systems.
You’ll further explore microprocessors and data acquisition processes and become familiar with actuator functions within mechatronic systems. Practical sessions will complement your theoretical learning, allowing you to apply concepts in hands-on scenarios with real-world systems.
A comprehensive understanding of fluid mechanics is essential to the discipline of engineering. In this module, you’ll be introduced to core concepts such as fluid properties, hydrostatics, mass, momentum and energy conservation principles, viscous flow behaviours, dimensional analysis, and drag/lift forces.
You’ll learn analytical techniques to quantify these phenomena and solve complex fluid mechanics problems that are integral to engineering systems and components. These include internal flows like pipe flow as well as external flows over immersed bodies and aerodynamic surfaces. You’ll learn to evaluate forces, energy requirements, power consumption, and performance parameters for systems involving fluids such as pumps, turbines, aerodynamic vehicles and more.
These concepts are reinforced through hands-on laboratory experiments as well as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations that are employed to model and visualise complex flows. Overall, the module will help you develop essential knowledge and skills for analysing and solving fluid flow problems in engineering practice.
A strong understanding of dynamics and mechanism analysis is essential for crafting mechanical components with dynamic motion. This proficiency enables a comprehensive evaluation of forces, accelerations, velocities, and interactions, ensuring optimal performance across various applications. It’s at the core of high-value industries such as automotive or aerospace.
You’ll gain essential knowledge of kinematics and kinetics of particles and rigid bodies that you’ll apply to models and evaluate the velocity, acceleration, forces, and moment of rigid components.
You’ll also learn about mechanisms and machine design and how to analyse the dynamics of mechanisms before applying them to applications. You’ll also apply your skills and knowledge from this module in your projects.
Classical and modern manufacturing technologies play a key role in driving product development and innovation across various industrial sectors. Integrating these technologies into industrial applications promotes sustainable design and manufacturing, minimises waste and resource consumption and boosts the fabrication of new products and materials.
You’ll gain knowledge of state-of-the-art manufacturing technologies and modern techniques such as additive manufacturing. You’ll then acquire practical skills in using these technologies through several lab sessions and practices. This module also promotes the principles of sustainable design and green manufacturing, both of which reduce environmental impact and promote long-term viability and resilience.
Vibration is a common mechanical phenomenon and changes in vibration pattern may indicate likely wear, fault or failure of devices. Understanding vibration characteristics and their manipulation is therefore critical to ensuring the stability, safety and optimal operation of modern devices.
In this module, you’ll learn the principles of vibration theory, which will enable you to carry out critical analysis and design appropriate damping mechanisms. Vibration analysis includes damped vibration, free and forced vibration, MDOF systems, modelling of a tuned vibration absorber and vibration testing techniques. Additionally, your study of control systems will include system modelling in general, stability analysis, and PID controllers, and will include both continuous and discrete time systems.
Lecture materials, hands-on experiments, computer simulations and case studies are carefully designed to strengthen your learning experience. After successfully completing this module, you’ll have essential knowledge in vibration analysis and system control that is required for advanced engineering and working professionally in the field.
Teamwork lies at the heart of this module, seamlessly blending practical group projects with supporting lectures, emphasising the development of technical proficiency, transferable skills, sustainability, and security awareness. You will collaborate in teams to explore mechanical and electronic hardware, software development, entrepreneurship, and sustainable practices. Through hands-on project work, you will gain expertise in sensor data acquisition, programming, hardware design, understanding security protocols, and integrating sustainability principles. Additionally, you will address crucial topics such as innovation, financial management, intellectual property protection, and commercialisation strategies with a sustainable and security-oriented perspective. By merging technical knowledge with entrepreneurial insight, sustainability principles, and a focus on security, this module equips you with a comprehensive toolkit for navigating the complexities of modern innovation and enterprise securely and sustainably.
You take all compulsory modules and choose one from a list of optional modules.
Robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are currently the most exciting fields in engineering. We are preparing for a robotics and AI revolution that will change our lives at every level and bring us one step closer to the integration of humans and machines.
You’ll comprehensively explore the key concepts in robotics and artificial intelligence and gain essential subject knowledge. You’ll learn theoretical tools to describe kinematics and dynamics for industrial robot systems with several degrees of freedom and use cutting-edge AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms in robots. You’ll also discover software/hardware integration in robot architectures for advanced tasks (e.g. obstacle avoidance learning), industrial applications and the adoption of AI in robotics.
You’ll progress to cover industrial tests as well as statics and dynamics of robots, dynamic modelling, and industrial control strategies. By the end of the module, you’ll be equipped with a solid foundation in robotics and AI, and be empowered with essential theoretical knowledge and practical skills for designing, modelling, and controlling robotic systems.
This is an opportunity for independent study on a topic of your own choice. Working on the project is a major part of your final year of study, taking place in spring and summer terms. It’s a chance for you to conduct in-depth research on a subject that is relevant to your course, helping you to further develop essential skills.
It will also challenge you to solve problems which involve the critical consideration of engineering and relevant legal, social, ethical and professional issues. It will enable you to develop and practise a professional approach to delivering written and oral presentations. You will be allocated a supervisor who will support you through weekly meetings and other communications.
To help you build the required knowledge and skills you’ll need for a successful engineering project, you’ll attend a series of lectures and workshops. These will cover topics such as design and production techniques; reliability, availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS), quality, safety and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC); as well as ethical, environmental and EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) issues.
Finite element analysis (FEA) plays a crucial role in engineering by allowing a detailed examination of industrial components, offering insights into their structural behaviour under different conditions.
You’ll learn about the principles of finite element methods and how to formulate and solve a physical example through this numerical method by identifying the boundary conditions, element types, loading scenarios, etc. Through simulations of real-world industrial cases, FEA enables cost-effective and efficient design optimisation, reducing the necessity for extensive physical prototypes.
This computational tool will enable you to improve the accuracy of predicting stress, strain, and deformation, ensuring that industrial components are engineered with precision and reliability, ultimately optimising performance and durability. Furthermore, you’ll learn about the sources of inaccuracies and errors in finite element analysis, postprocessing approaches and how to critically evaluate the FEA results.
Thermodynamics is the foundation for heat engines, power plants, refrigerators, and many more important inventions that the modern world relies on. In this module, you’ll develop a thorough understanding of the laws of thermodynamics, energy analyses, and the modes of heat transfer.
You’ll learn how to analyse and apply these concepts to practical engineering systems and processes including power generation, refrigeration systems, heat exchangers, and thermal management solutions across various industries.
You’ll discover how to critically evaluate system performance, optimise designs, and propose integrated engineering solutions. The module also incorporates hands-on laboratory experiments and computer simulations to reinforce theoretical learning and cultivate practical skills.
Biomaterials are substances designed to interact with biological systems. They serve various purposes such as assessment, treatment, support, or replacement of tissues, organs, or bodily functions.
The objective of this module is to give you a comprehensive understanding of biomaterials, emphasising their interactions within the biological environment. The module begins by examining the mechanics of materials, covering fundamental concepts such as stress, strain, bending, and shear. You’ll then look at a diverse range of biomaterials and their applications within the human body.
You’ll develop critical thinking skills and apply biomaterial principles to solve complex problems in areas such as the development of human implants. This module gives you a solid foundation in biomaterials, preparing you for careers in research, healthcare, engineering, and beyond.
What sources of renewable energy are there? How are technological developments improving electrical generation and meeting the global rise in demand for clean energy?
After exploring the impact of fossil fuels on our environment, you’ll get an overview of various renewable energy sources and their associated challenges and opportunities. We’ll then focus on some major sources – like solar energy and wind power technologies – in more detail.
You’ll also briefly look at other renewable energy sources such as wave and tidal, hydropower and geothermal and get a brief overview of energy storage. By the end of the module, you’ll have a strong sense of which technologies are being proposed to meet the world's growing demand for green energy.
Teaching includes practical work in conventional laboratory experiments or projects, lecture modules and examples classes, which develop your problem-solving skills, and staff hold regular ‘surgeries’ where you can discuss any questions you have. Practical work is carried out in air-conditioned laboratories, with state-of-the-art equipment and outstanding IT infrastructure.
Stage 1 modules are assessed by coursework and examination at the end of the year. Stage 2 and 3 modules, with the exception of the Stage 3 project, are assessed by a combination of coursework and examination. All years include project work to replicate industrial practice and develop skills to maximise employability.
For a student studying full time, each academic year of the programme will comprise 1200 learning hours which include both direct contact hours and private study hours. The precise breakdown of hours will be subject dependent and will vary according to modules.
Methods of assessment will vary according to subject specialism and individual modules.
Please refer to the individual module details under Course Structure.
For course aims and learning outcomes please see the course specification.
You'll develop into a well-rounded graduate, confident of your future opportunities as we support you to recognise and learn the essential skills and attributes needed by industries in the UK and overseas.
This course has been designed in discussion with industrial employers, our Industrial Panel, IET, our graduates, and students. This allows the latest real-world developments and latest academic research to be included in the curriculum. Lecturers and guest speakers include those with industry experience and experience working with industry on research and commercial innovation. We use this industrial knowledge and our networks to support your development.
Accreditation will be sought from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers(IMechE) enabling students to satisfy the partial educational requirements of the IMechE for Chartered Engineer (CEng) registration upon successful completion of the course.
The Careers and Employability Service supports you when looking for graduate employment, placements, work experience, internships, and volunteering. They help you to identify career paths, and support you through applications, interviews and assessment centres. They also provide a programme of events, giving you industry insight and an opportunity to network.
*The Government announced on 4 November 2024 that tuition fees in England for Home students will increase to £9,535 from £9,250 for the academic year 2025/26. This increase requires Parliamentary approval, which is expected to be given in early/mid 2025.
Tuition fees may be increased in the second and subsequent years of your course. Detailed information on possible future increases in tuition fees is contained in the Tuition Fees Increase Policy.
The University will assess your fee status as part of the application process. If you are uncertain about your fee status you may wish to seek advice from UKCISA before applying.
For details of when and how to pay fees and charges, please see our Student Finance Guide.
You will require regular access to a desktop computer/laptop with an internet connection to use the University of Kent’s online resources and systems. Please see information about the minimum computer requirements for study.
Find out more about accommodation and living costs, plus general additional costs that you may pay when studying at Kent.
Kent offers generous financial support schemes to assist eligible undergraduate students during their studies. See our funding page for more details.
We have a range of subject-specific awards and scholarships for academic, sporting and musical achievement.
Next steps
If you are from the UK or Ireland, you must apply for this course through UCAS. If you are not from the UK or Ireland, you can apply through UCAS or directly on our website if you have never used UCAS and you do not intend to use UCAS in the future.
We welcome applications from students all around the world with a wide range of international qualifications.
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