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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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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Yoann Hebert — numerical modeling, geomechanics. Mr. Hebert has worked on the determination of the mechanical properties of a soil by inverse analysis during the digging of a tunnel in Toulon (France). He has performed a stability analysis of a 30-year-old cavern and has participated in a mechanical study of a rock-fill dam constructed above a concrete gallery.
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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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