Professor Phil Prangnell is a senior academic who is highly active in industrially-driven metallurgical research at the interface between materials processing and manufacturing in the aerospace and transport Industries. He has a history of high impact research and strong engagement with industry, as well as successful collaborations in flagship multi-partner projects with other universities (e.g. Sheffield, Cambridge, Cranfield, Heriot Watt etc).

He completed his PhD at Darwin College, Cambridge, in 1992 and was appointed to a lectureship at Manchester in the same year, before being promoted to a personal chair in Materials Engineering in 2005 and currently holds an Airbus-RAEng senior research Chair in Metallurgical Excellence (2017). He has worked in the field of light alloy metallurgy his entire career, primarily on the processing of and manufacturing with aerospace materials.

Professor Prangnell’s research interests focus on understanding and modelling interactions between phase transformations, deformation, and advanced industrial manufacturing processes in light alloys for the transport sector. He has worked extensively with the aerospace industry, including on: welding processes for airframe structures, joining dissimilar metals and friction welding, as well as variations on friction stir process (e.g. FSSW, static shoulder FSW, USW etc.) and composite to metal joining thermomechanical processing of titanium alloys; forming processes such as creep-age forming; and has a long standing interest in ultra-high strain deformation. He is also working with DSTL and BAE SYSTEMS on the repair of Al-intensive fighting vehicles. More recently, his interests have extended to understanding relationships between process variables and microstructure development in additive manufacturing, with a view to designing new materials specifically for AM and to aid industry in optimising this new technology and accelerating its application in the aerospace sector, for both repair and component manufacture.