People
Yves Bourgault
Research
Prof. Bourgault is interested in the development of numerical models of the heart and cardiovascular system. He works in particular on the construction of reliable geometrical models of the heart through medical image segmentation, on mathematical models of the propagation of electrophysiological waves in the myocardium and on pulsating blood flows.
Prof. Bourgault develops his own generic finite element tools that can be used on high-performance computers to simulate physical systems with space and time dependence, and usually modelled through partial differential equations. Recent applications also include multi-phase flows of aerosol in lung airways and reacting flows in fuel cells.
Training
Yves Bourgault is born in Quebec City, Canada. He obtained his B.Sc. in mathematics from Laval University in 1986. He then completed at the same institution a master degree in 1989 and a doctoral degree in 1996 under the supervision of Professor Michel Fortin and for which, he was a recipient of fellowships from the Fonds pour la Formation des Chercheurs et l'Aide a la Recherche (Fonds FCAR, Quebec). His doctoral thesis was on the analysis of the conservation properties of finite element methods when used to compute supersonic flows with shock waves.
From 1990 to 1992, Dr. Bourgault worked as a research associate at the Swiss Polytechnic Federal Institute of Lausanne, in particular on the parabolized Navier-Stokes equations modelling hypersonic flows. In 1995, he joined the team of the Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of Concordia University, headed by professor Wagdi G. Habashi, initially as a research associate and then as a research assistant professor. He was the technical coordinator of a university-industry consortium on the numerical simulation of in-flight icing, still a major concern for aircraft safety. As part of this project, his main contributions are the development of an Eulerian model of icing droplet impingement and a thermodynamical model of ice accretion. DROP3D, the Eulerian droplet impingement model, is now commonly used in the aerospace industries all over Canada, the United States and the Europe.
In July 1999, he was appointed as an assistant professor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Ottawa. He is associate professor since 2004.