Carlos Ovalle

Carlos Ovalle is an Associate Professor at the Department of Civil, Geological and Mining Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal since 2018. He is a principal researcher in the Granular mechanics for mining geotechnics lab and a member of the Institute for Research in Mining and the Environment (IRME) UQAT-Polytechnique.

• B.Sc. in Civil Engineering from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Chile (2010)
• M.Sc. in Geotechnical Engineering from École Centrale Paris, France (2010)
• Ph.D. from École Centrale de Nantes, France (2013)

Ovalle's research focuses on mining geotechnics, particularly hydromechanical degradation of geomaterials, experimental geotechnics, and constitutive modeling of granular materials. His work addresses mining waste management and co-disposal facilities for sustainable resource recovery. Recent publications analyze particle shape effects, sample size scaling, and multiscale liquefaction mechanisms.

He supervises 3 postdoctoral researchers and 8 doctoral students, including Manuel Cardenas-Barrantes (Multiscale granular mechanics), David Cantor (DEM simulations), and Sergio Carrasco (Numerical particle modeling). His team collaborates on numerical and experimental approaches to mining waste stability and soil treatment technologies like MICP (Microbially Induced Carbonate Precipitation).

Ovalle has contributed to major projects on mine waste rock piles, tailings storage facilities, and slope stability analysis using 2D/3D FEM simulations. His datasets from triaxial tests (2020) and 2025 co-disposal experiments provide critical resources for mining geotechnics research.