Ignasi de Pouplana Sardà is a Civil Engineer by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) since 2014. He is also a Master in Structural & Construction Engineering and a Ph.D. in Structural Analysis by the same university since 2015 and 2018, respectively.
His scientific career started in 2012 at the International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE, www.cimne.com) when, in the context of the Civil Engineering bachelor thesis, he worked on the implementation and validation of a new code of the Discrete Element Method (DEM). In 2014 he started working on continuum damage mechanics in the field of the Finite Element Method (FEM) under the supervision of Professor Eugenio Oñate, and developed a new approach for the failure analysis of quasi-brittle materials by combining non-local damage models with adaptive mesh refinement techniques.
He developed the Ph.D. with the research focused on fluid-structure interaction in porous and fractured media. Topics of major interest included: stable analysis of the fluid flux in porous media, fracture of the solid matrix driven by the fluid pressure, and adaptivity of the mesh to propagate fractures in the porous domain by using non-local damage models along with “quasi-zero-thickness interface elements”.
Ignasi is currently a postdoctoral researcher at CIMNE working on the extension of the interface elements for different contact applications, such as the study of the pull-out strength of ribbed bars in concrete, or the analysis of multi-delamination processes in composite materials.
Furthermore, in the last years he has participated in various research projects at CIMNE applied to different engineering problems: monitoring of stresses during the construction process of concrete arch dams, optimization of drill bit geometries for Particle Impact Drilling (PID) technology, prediction of the final stress state of metallic pieces during casting processes, quantification of sand production in well completions, and prediction of NO2 concentration in urban areas, to name a few.
He is also an associate lecturer at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (DECA) in UPC, and he is currently participating on three different courses: Structural Analysis in the Master in Civil Engineering, Structural Dynamics in the Master in Structural and Construction Engineering, and Finite Elements in the Master in Numerical Methods in Engineering. Ignasi has already supervised one PhD thesis successfully completed and he is now supervising three more, which have widened his research expertise beyond his doctoral knowledge, i.e., transport of substances in fluids through convection-diffusion-absorption, local-scale fluid-solid particles interaction, and large-scale wave propagation.
Finally, he is also an active developer of Kratos Multiphysics (https://github.com/KratosMultiphysics/Kratos), the GitHub open-source framework for building simulation software of CIMNE, which has given him a deep understanding of C++ and Python programming languages.
So far, Ignasi de Pouplana has published 11 JCR articles and has an additional one under revision. They accumulate 51 citations according to Scopus and 75 according to Google Scholar, with an h-index of 5.