Louis François Auguste Ménard, undergraduate student at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, deposited on January 1955, via his alumnus P. Regimbeau, a patent on the pressuremeter.

This apparatus resulted from Menard’s fruitful thoughts when, as a student trainee, he was handling soil samples at a job site. He then submitted his idea in his graduation project in the shape of a theory and a first prototype. Next year, at the University of Illinois in cooperation with Professor Peck, within the four semesters he spent at the Talbot Laboratory, Menard built a second pressuremeter prototype and started his tests. He understood that he had to develop a new approach too for the design of foundations whereby the pressuremeter will play a central role.

With such a new vision of geotechnical engineering, from the late sixties up to his untimely death in 1978, Louis Menard could become the pioneer in the ground improvement field. With pressuremeter tests he could perfectly demonstrate the soil improvement rate in terms of expected settlements before and after treatment.

Patents

Publications

Medias