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IMechE honours exceptional engineers at annual dinner

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Seven engineers representing all generations have been honoured by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ Prestige and Vision Awards 2019 at the Institution’s Annual Dinner, which took place on 21 November, at Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum.

Institute graduate Megan Hadley and her collaborators received the Thomas Hawksley Gold Medal for their research into hip replacement materials.  The award is presented for the best original papers published by the Institution during the previous 12 months.

Megan’s paper presents an improvement in the way hip replacement implants are tested. Today, most implants are tested in laboratories where they are put under stress to help assess their expected ‘lifetime’. The current approach assesses how long an implant would survive under continuous walking conditions in a lab. While this gives some idea of an implant’s potential lifetime, it is far from realistic – human beings stop, start, sit down and get up.

Along with her colleagues, Megan developed a new model for testing hip implants which more closely resembles ‘real world’ usage. In her model, the test implants go through a ‘walk, stop, dwell, start again’ model. This much more closely reflects how people move around – walking along, stopping to look at something, before continuing.

To read the full article on the IMechE website please click here.