Offices

Itasca Consultants S.A.S.

Background Staff Contact

Itasca Consultants was created in 1991 and is based in Lyon, France. With help from its subsidiaries in Germany and Spain, it serves the European Union market, Scandinavia excepted. Consulting from the French office is concentrated in France, with work in Belgium and research projects for the European Commission.

Work is performed mostly in two areas : Fractured Rock Hydrogeology and Civil Engineering.

Itasca Consultants has developed software and contributes strongly to Research & Development programs for understanding water flow and contaminant transport near a nuclear waste repository in a fractured rock environment, including site characterization methodology, modeling, and development of the key concepts for assessing repository safety.

In the Civil Engineering field, Itasca Consultants helps Itasca software clients build models, builds models for them, or performs the complete modeling sequence—including interpretation. Models range from the very simple (where our experience with the codes yields very fast and low-cost answers) to the highly sophisticated (with very complex geometries, phasing, and coupling effects).

Daniel Billaux — numerical modeling, fractured rock hydrogeology and geomechanics. Dr. Billaux's expertise is in numerical modeling, fractured rock hydrogeology and geomechanics. He has developed and applied numerical models to simulate the flow of water in fractured rock. He has been a program manager for projects in the area of nuclear waste storage and geothermal energy and has provided consulting on many mining and civil engineering projects.
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Lauriane Bouzeran — rock mechanics, numerical modeling. Ms. Bouzeran has used a micro-macro Distinct Element approach for evaluating the influence of joints on rock mass properties. She also has modeled tunnel excavation and reinforcement in continuum media.
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Marco Camusso — geotechnical engineering, rock mechanics. Mr. Camusso has worked in the geotechnical and rock mechanics fields for over five years. His consulting activities have been carried out primarily in evaluation of tunnel stability and nuclear waste storage, study of soil-geotextile interaction and simulation of soil behavior during the excavation of a micro-tunnel. Most of Mr. Camusso’s numerical modeling expertise comes from using Itasca's PFC2D, PFC3D and FLAC3D codes.
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Caroline Darcel — hydrogeological modeling. Dr. Darcel has worked on geometrical characterization and hydrogeological modeling of fractured media. She has focused on the multi-scale properties of network fractures, characterized by power-law fracture size distributions and fractal spatial-density distributions. Dr. Darcel also has developed unsaturated flow codes.
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Fabian Dedecker — soil and rock Mechanics, numerical modeling. Dr. Dedecker is a Civil Engineer with over 8 years of experience in the geotechnical and mechanical engineering fields. His areas of specialization are nuclear waste disposal research, the static and dynamic stability of rock dam, and the study of flow in fractured rock masses, based mainly on discrete approaches.
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Sacha Emam — quasi-static & dynamic behavior of granular systems. Mr. Emam has worked on the relation between micro-mechanical parameters and large-scale mechanical properties (elastic moduli, friction angle, dilatancy, etc.) of granular systems. He has conducted both numerical studies (distinct element simulations) and laboratory tests on granular samples (uncemented glass beads) under quasi-static loading, with particular focus on the roles of the packing history and the geometry of the produced samples as they relate to their small- and large-strain macroscopic mechanical properties. Mr. Emam also has been involved in the numerical study of the flow and jamming behavior of dry and cohesive granular media.
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Jean-Christophe Henry — numerical modeling, geomechanics. Mr. Henry has analyzed the mechanical behavior of a nuclear waste disposal facility loaded by a soil layer to optimize the design of the concrete enclosure that contains nuclear waste. Before joining Itasca, he was involved in several projects for EDF, including the design of a lifting platform for the replacement of steam generators and various studies on the overall operation of a PWR nuclear power plant.
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Romain Le Goc — numerical modeling in hydrogeology. Dr. Le Goc’s expertise is in numerical modeling of fracture media. He is a graduate engineer in computer sciences and has a Ph.D. in hydrogeology from the University of Rennes, France. He is skilled in natural media issues and in developing efficient numerical models. Dr. Le Goc has worked on the inverse problem in hydrogeology for highly channeled flow in heterogeneous media, participated in Discrete Fracture Network (DFN) modeling for nuclear-waste disposal sites in Sweden, and investigated the link between the fracturing properties of natural media and the resulting hydraulic and mechanical properties in the context of the mining industry.
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Wenjie Shiu — numerical modeling. Dr. Shiu has 4 years’ experience in discrete element numerical simulation. His main research topics concern the non-linear behavior of the cohesive material (concrete compaction process) and local damage prediction (perforation, penetration and scabbing) of a structure during a dynamic loading (missile impact). Dr. Shiu currently is working on a European project (ProchePuits) that involves PFC2D simulation.
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