Dracsys

Geological engineer from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and the University of Barcelona in 2003. He also holds a Master of Advanced Studies (DEA) from ENS de Géologie Nancy (Université de Lorraine) 2001 and a Doctorate in Civil Engineering from the UPC in 2017 with the thesis "Zero-thickness interface elements in petroleum geomechanics: sand production and hydraulic fracture", carried out under the supervision of Professor Ignacio Carol. From 2008 to 2022, he was part of the group that developed the DRAC finite element code (MECànica MATerials group at UPC) and participated in several research and industrial projects. The work carried out has focused on modelling coupled problems with brittle behaviour: hydraulic fracturing, stability of geological discontinuities, solid production in hydrocarbon wells, numerical modelling of concrete specimens, etc. Since 2022, he is part of the team of the company Dracsys, a spin-off of the UPC of which he is a founding member, where he carries out management and product development tasks.

Full Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, within the School of Civil Engineering at UPC, Barcelona. He is the leader of the research group of Mechanics of Materials which currently includes 3 permanent faculty, 4 doctoral students, one post-doc and a variable number of master and graduate students developing their theses. Former doctoral students of the group have become permanent faculty at prestigious universities, or hold relevant positions in industry. The MECMAT group works on the continuous improvement of the in-house developed Finite Element Method (FEM) codes for PDEs (DRAC, DRACFLOW, etc), oriented to materials fracture and damage for different applications, which are equipped with MPI parallel capabilities and link to major commercial or open-source pre-post processors. The group has recently created the spinoff company DRACSYS, which has overtaken the maintenance and commercialization of the code, and also incorporates some of the former post-doctoral members of the group. The scientific production of I.Carol includes 14 PhD thesis defended (+ 4 currently under way), over 60 papers in SCI journal, over 200 conference papers published and 17 competitive projects awarded, including European projects, several industrial projects some of them with relevant funding plus a number of smaller grants for travel, equipment, meetings, etc.

Obtained his PhD in 1987 with a thesis on micromechanical models and fracture mechanics of concrete and geomaterials. In the period 1988-1991 he was CSIC Scientific Collaborator at the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona, and in 1991 he acceded to his current position at the UPC. Since 1997 he has been a professor of "Soil Mechanics" in the Degrees of Civil Engineering (of which he is responsible professor) and Geological Engineering, at the ETS de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos de Barcelona. He is also a professor of the subjects "Numerical Models in Geotechnical Engineering" and "Advanced Soil Mechanics" (as responsible professor) of the Master in Terrain Engineering at the same School. He has also been a professor of other undergraduate and postgraduate subjects at the same centre. In the period 2007-2012 he was Deputy Director Head of Civil Engineering Studies at the School of Civil Engineering of Barcelona, actively participating in the process of changing curricula to adapt them to the EHEA. He is the author of more than 100 published articles, of which about 50 in journals indexed in the JCR. The central theme of his research is the study of the formation and propagation of fissures and cracks in soils due to changes in humidity. The work carried out has crystallized in five doctoral theses, with another in progress on the same subject, which have allowed a better understanding of the mechanisms of initiation and propagation of cracks by desiccation, in natural conditions, where environmental oscillations of humidity, temperature, etc., make the analysis of the problem especially complex. From 1990 he worked on the development of the DRAC code, a basic tool to solve numerical problems in the field of geomechanics in the MECMAT group. This source code has been modified over the years to be the fundamental software of the company Dracsys, of which he has been one of its founders.

Geological Engineer by Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and University of Barcelona (UB) 2013, she completed Master's degree in Geotechnical Engineering at UPC in 2015 and in 2018 obtained her Doctorate in Geotechnical Engineering under supervision of Prof. I.Carol on the topic of numerical modeling of cracking along non-preestablished paths. Since then she has been employed twice by O&G company REPSOL in their E&P Project division (@Repsol Technology Lab) performing numerical simulations and post processing analysis in the context of coupled hydro-mechanical problems. From 2020 to August 2023 Laura was Senior Research Engineer at MECMAT group at UPC, working on flow in porous medium, hydro-mechanical coupling in CCSU, including aquifers and depleted hydrocarbon fields. Since September 2022 she is the CTO and Geomechanics Specialist at spinoff company Dracsys S.L. working in the development of advanced numerical tools for geomechanics: T-H-MC coupled analysis with fractures and discontinuities.

Civil Engineer from Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (2013). She finished her Master’s degree in Geotechnical Engineering at Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) in 2018. In 2024 obtained her Doctorate in Geotechnical Engineering. on the topic of numerical modelling of non-isothermal multiphase flow in fractured rock masses, under the supervision of Profs. Ignacio Carol and Carlos López of the MECMAT research group at UPC. During her doctoral studies, she participated in R&D projects focused on acid attack on oil-well cement and proppant transport in hydraulic fracturing. Since May 2023, she is a software developer at spinoff company Dracsys S.L. where she is working on the development of a fully-coupled thermo-hydro-gas-mechanical (THGM) FE model using zero-thickness interface elements.