As announced a few months ago, Michel Gambin passed away on June 30, 2024. You will find below the bibliography of this great man who marked the history of Apageo! 

In 2005, at the ISP 5 symposium, Michel Gambin, scientific advisor at Apageo, wrote an article on the 50 years of the pressure meter. You can read it below. 

ABSTRACT - The rules for using the values of the modulus EM and the limiting pressure P*LM in the pressuremeter method require the user to take into consideration the ratio EM/P*LM to make a classification of the soils, and in particular to fix the value of the rheological coefficient α, a decision whose consequence is important for the predictions of settlement and other deformations. The proposed graphical representation has been an aid for this choice for more than a decade.

SCIENTIFIC WORKS AND PUBLICATIONS FROM 1956 TO 2010 Bibliography established on the occasion of the VIIIth COULOMB Conference given by Mr. Michel GAMBIN for the French Committee of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnics on June 4th 2010, Ecole Spéciale des Travaux Publics, Paris

Coulomb ConferenceParis, 4 June 2010 French Committee for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnics (CFMS)Wind turbines and Young's modulusDuring the CFMS technical meeting on wind turbines, I promised to send the CFMS a Technical Note on "Young's modulus": here it is.I would like this note to be widely distributed within the CFMS, because as Olivier Combarieu says: "The error comes from the fact that we apply to soils finite element calculation models developed for materials for which the theory of elasticity is perfectly acceptable". He adds: "Now, in France, we no longer control the situation and I believe that this deserves a wide-ranging reflection at the national level. I am very surprised to see that, within certain National Projects, in the work presented by participants, compressible soils are characterised by a Young's modulus and a Poisson's ratio! "Shouldn't we open a "free debate" on the subject, by launching a "forum" on the CFMS website (a new heading would appear in the left-hand list - "roster" in American - of the home page of our site) which would be initiated by this text and a commentary by Olivier Combarieu? During the technical meeting of the CFMS on 20 October 2009 on wind turbines, several speakers insisted on the role of the "Young's modulus" in the foundation design of wind turbines in order to comply with the industrial rules of the suppliers of the devices.However, if I refer to Olivier Combarieu's exhaustive communication on "L'usage des modules de déformation en géotechnique" published in the Revue Française de Géotechnique N° 114 of the 1st quarter of 2006, I never see the expression "Young's modulus" appearing! This is because, despite the few references to "Young's modulus" in Eurocode 7i, Young's modulus has no intrinsic meaning! Hubert on "Fondations et ouvrages en terre" (Eyrolles, 2001, 2nd edition 2002ii), the most recent French book on our subject. This figure expresses the relationship between σ, the major principal stress applied to a cylindrical specimen subjected to a triaxial test andεt, the resulting relative strain (dh/h).

Gérard ARSONNET, Geomatech, Champlan - France Jean-Pierre BAUD, Eurogeo, Avrainville - France Michel GAMBIN, Apageo, Magny les Hameaux - France AbstractIn continuation of Louis Ménard's research and development, several of his collaborators, in association with younger geotechnicians, have sought a means of creating the cavity where the pressuremeter probe is to be inserted, using the most recent drilling techniques, the procedure remaining globally economical. The proposed cavity is virtually free of reworking and the surrounding soil free of relaxation. Comparative examples are provided in a large number of soils.Introduction From the very beginning of the use of the pressure meter, Louis Ménard and his first collaborators were confronted with criticism from geotechnical experts who were sceptical about the representativeness of the tests in different types of soil. The first users therefore had to define the drilling and testing conditions that gave the most reliable results. The role of good borehole wall retention and the availability of a cylindrical cavity well calibrated to the diameter of the probe soon became essential (PLM, 1962). The use of the hand auger, at shallow depth, in dry conditions in predominantly clay soils above the water table, or with bentonite circulation, thus became the archetypal quality test. The probe could be introduced shortly after drilling into a well-cut, smooth-walled hole, in which contact with the ground was obtained in the first few steps without any trace of reworking (LCPC 1971). The geotechnical drilling machines of the 1960s were mainly mechanically driven and built for core drilling. Louis Ménard and his collaborators initially produced pressuremeter probes with diameters adapted to 3'', 3½'', 4'', 4½'' and even larger corers. The handling and installation times of the probe were too long and favoured the decompression of the excavated soil with core drill type tools. It was therefore not long before probes with smaller diameters, 32mm (1¼''), 44mm (1¾''), 63mm (2½''), were used for hand augering or by beating a core drill. Early on, Louis Menard (1959) patented the split tube for direct driving of the probe in granular soils below the water table, where the cavity walls are difficult to maintain without slumping. Hydraulic vibro-driving machines were also designed and produced to use this split tube, mainly in marine environments (Ménard and Gambin, 1965). A second problem was, and still is, crucial, that of the downtime associated with carrying out the tests of an 'authorised pass' according to the standard: the time spent raising the drilling tool after each pass, then the time spent lowering the probe to carry out the test, and finally the time spent raising the probe and lowering the drilling tool. It was with the aim of solving these problems of dead time that new research was launched, which led to the filing of a patent that contained the seeds of the process we are about to present (Ménard 1976). The concept of self-drilling of a tube, here by "back-jet", possibly associated with a cable ramming using a slender ram, sliding in the lower part of the tube, and that of a pressure meter probe placed permanently in line with the split part along several generatrices of the tube (figure 1), can be found there.