Mr. DesAutels has 11 years of experience conducting air dispersion modeling using EPA guideline models including CALMET/CALPUFF and AERMOD. This experience includes modeling of industrial and mobile sources both in the United States and the Middle East. He has worked to develop emissions databases and programs for mobile sources to properly account for fleet composition age and vehicle turn over times.
Mr. DesAutels has also conducted Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling to understand atmospheric flows and dispersion in complex situations. This has included modeling accidental spills of flashing and dense gases during rail, transportation and industrial accidents, cooling tower plume re-circulation modeling and wind energy applications. Mr. DesAutels is experienced in the use of the FLUENT CFD model for atmospheric modeling and has also conducted studies using the OpenFOAM CFD platform. Mr. DesAutels is experienced in system administration and configuration of Linux high power computing systems and programming in both FORTRAN and Perl for manipulating and evaluating large data sets.
Prior to joining Exponent Mr. DesAutels was a Senior Meteorologist at TRC Corporations where he conducted air quality and CFD modeling. This work included a validation study of the FLUENT model for accidental large-scale releases of ammonia and H2S.
DesAutels, CG, Schulman, LL. Evaluation of the desert tortoise ammonia field tests with the FLUENT CFD model using unsteady RANS, 5th International Symposium on Wind Engineering, Chapel Hill, NC, 2010.