Brouard Consulting SAS

Brouard Consulting SAS is a consulting and engineering office founded in 1999 by Benoit Brouard, who received his Ph.D. from Ecole Polytechnique, ParisTech, France. With support from the Laboratory of Solids Mechanics (LMS) at Ecole Polytechnique, this small company has developed worldwide acknowledged expertise in several areas. Brouard Consulting SAS initially conducted research related to the field of solution-mined caverns. These caverns, which can be several millions of cubic meters large, are leached out from deep salt formations, typically at depths between 200 m and 3000 m. They are designed for liquid or liquefied hydrocarbon storage, or for natural gas storage at high pressure. Strategic petroleum reserves, both in the USA (more than 700 million barrels) and in France, have been created in rock salt. Some of these caverns are used only for salt production in connection with chemical plants for the plastics industry. The caverns also can be used to store huge amounts of energy as compressed air, especially that associated with intermittent energy production of energy from wind power, for instance. Brouard Consulting SAS is an original and unique company that tackles actual industrial issues at several levels. There is, of course, the theoretical work of modeling all involved phenomena (mechanical, thermal, hydraulic or chemical), which often are coupled, and usually are required to develop numerical programs or to design innovative tests to fit models.