Chris Triantafyllou announced as the winner of the whittle reactionaries medal by the imeche

MRG PhD student, Chris Triantafyllou, has been named the winner of the esteemed Whittle Reactionaries Prize 2018 by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE).

The Whittle Reactionaries Prize Fund was established in 1998 by a group of Institution members in recognition of those engineers and others who had directly assisted Sir Frank Whittle in his company Power Jets Ltd during its pioneering and evolutionary work with reaction propulsion (jet propulsion) from the first experiments in 1937 to first operation use of Whittle Type W2B engines in an RAF Meteor aircraft in 1944.

Air Cdre Paul Lloyd of the RAF & MoD (left), presenting the medal to Chris Triantafyllou (right) during the annual meeting of the aerospace division in London

Chris' work on implementing a scalable crystal plasticity model to simulate the cold-dwell fatigue behaviour of Ti64 billet was adjudicated by a panel of engineers chosen by the Combined Propulsion Technical Activity Committee of the IMechE and the Royal Aeronautical Society. The objective of the prize is to stimulate and encourage those in the early stages of their engineering career to continue to apply innovative and forward-looking thinking to aerospace propulsion problems that demonstrates:

• Technical excellence
• Originality and independent thinking
• High-quality presentation and effective communication

​​Chris added:

This is a tremendous honour so early on in my career and the fact that it bears the name of the man who's been such an inspiration adds even more value for me. I am proud to be a small part of our thriving and fascinating aerospace industry and I would like to express my gratitude to all the people that have helped me get here and of course the Institution for this recognition and the ongoing professional support.