Question

Why is proper nomenclature important in an engineering environment? Why is it important during an engineering economic analysis? Give a scenario from either your mechanical engineering experience or from your personal life where nomenclature affected a decision or outcome?

Answer 1

Nomenclature is a set of standard symbols, alphabets, numbers or Greek symbols to represent a particular formula. It is important to have proper nomenclature in engineering environment as the nomenclature would be standardised symbols used all across the world. there would be no confusion with the usage. In the engineering economic analysis, certain values are constant and can affect the result drastically. Thus if the standard nomenclature is used, there would fixed values for the symbols and thus the calculation can be done precisely.

For instance, Mango is known with different names all over the world. When I asked for mango in Greece, those people were not able to understand and I had to struggle a lot to make them understand. Finally when they were not able to understand and thus I had to give up eating mango. The same mango is known with scientific name 'Mangifera Indica' which is known and standardised worldwide and thus there would not be any problem in making people understand the same.