Domingo Elias is a Forensic Engineer with Haag, a Salas O’Brien Company, based in Houston, Texas. Dr. Elias’s background focuses on fire and explosion investigations and consulting. He has expertise in advanced modeling tools such as ANSYS Fluent and COMSOL Multiphysics, and their application to heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and reactive flows. He is also trained in the risk assessment tools FLACS and Phast for modeling the dispersion of flammables and toxic substances, fires, and explosions.

Having worked as a field engineer in the oil and gas service sector, Dr. Elias brings valuable field experience applicable to both onshore and offshore investigations. Likewise, he brings automotive technology experience to consulting. As an undergraduate, he interned with the Advanced Engineering and Research Group at NovaBus® (Volvo Group), contributed to the design and testing of natural gas and hybrid transit buses, and held an automotive technician license.

As a consultant, Dr. Elias has contributed fundamental research to understand the physical and chemical phenomena in novel accident cases, such as quantifying the energy involved in steam explosions and estimating the overpressure produced by a hydrogen cloud explosion resulting from the mixing of incompatible substances. He has participated in field testing and inspections and has presented technical findings at industry conferences. He has also contributed to business development by authoring proposals.

Prior to his consulting career, Dr. Elias conducted doctoral research in the Chemical and Mechanical Engineering departments at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He subsequently held a postdoctoral position at the same institution, where he applied optimization algorithms to packed-bed reactors and catalyst shapes to reduce hotspot formation in catalyst pellets and reactors and improve the yield of ethylene-producing reactions.