Show notes
Martin Kristelijn, the co-founder of IntoMachines, discusses innovative tools designed to make bolt tensioning faster, safer, and less expensive. The conversation highlights the challenges of manually tensioning thousands of bolts, the advantages of automated bolt tensioning for wind turbines, and the development of a weightless, more efficient tensioning system.
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Allen Hall: With wind turbines growing larger and bolts getting bigger, the industry needs smarter ways to handle critical bolted connections. This week we speak with Martin Kristelijn co-founder of IntoMachines. IntoMachines has developed unique tools that make bolt tensioning faster, safer, and much less expensive.
Welcome to Uptime, spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Martin, welcome to. To the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight.
Martin Kristelijn: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Allen Hall: Martin, there's a big problem out in the field that we have a lot of bolts to tension and not a lot of people to go do it. Plus I think as you and I had discussed previously, the bolt sizers are getting much bigger.
Everything is becoming heavier and just being very difficult to do into machines changes all that. But let's talk about the problem first. What are you seeing on factory lines and out in service as people try to tension bolts.
Martin Kristelijn: Past couple of months, year, I would say we spoke to a lot of people visited wind turbines, went in the field, see our technicians tighten the bolts also to the factories, so Elle production you name it.
And well, the, we kept on keeping getting the same feedback over and over. That they would like to speed up the bolting process and also that they would like to increase the quality, so to prevent any loose bolts or forgotten bolts. That was really the starting point for us. We started to focus on bolt tensioning, to automate it, to speed it up, and to increase the quality.
Allen Hall: So tensioning is the way going forward. A lot of of us remember torquing as being the preferred method to tighten bolts, but tensioning is now the way you wanna describe why that is?
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, still it depends on who you ask, but the main objective for everyone usually is to get a maintenance free building connection, right?
That you keep the maintenance cost as low as possible. So that's also our goal. And bolt tensioning for us is the most yeah. Convenient way forward to reach that.
Allen Hall: It's the most consistent way too, right? Is that with torquing, we really don't know what the preload is on the bolt. That's why engineers are preferring tension tools instead of torquing tools now.
Martin Kristelijn: Exactly. So with torquing you have a friction coefficient you need to take into account. That's an unpredictable. Value parameter. So you would like to get rid of that. And you do that by just grabbing the bolt itself, apply hydraulic pressure and stretch the bolt directly. And then you have your hydraulic pressure times the surface of your tension to, and that gives you exactly the the preload in your bolt and you tighten the nut, release the pressure, and your bolt is perfectly pretense.
As simple as that,
Allen Hall: right? So that process takes time to do. And if you have a factory worker or a technician doing tensioning to a lot of bolts of which there are thousands on a wind turbine but there's probably what, a couple hundred that are critical.
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. So around, give or take, 600 bolts critical bolted connections in a wind turbine.
And imagine that I said tightening the nut by hand. You have a wrench wrenching each of those 600 bolts. Then you have your pull bar. You need to thread that onto your bolt as well, or bolt stop bolt. Yeah, I can tell you that you don't want to do that all day by hand.
Allen Hall: So how does that work right now in, in the factories?
If they're doing it by hand? Is it are they changing people at that station because it just has to wear you out? Those bolts are big and that technique of tensioning manually is tiresome, right?
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, exactly. We visited some factories as well and also the installation sites. And the feedback we got is that people they hurt their arm.
And not after the 10 bolt, not after the a hundred bolt maybe. But after a thousand volts your arm really starts to hurt. And yeah. That's not good for your workforce, right? People need to be happy they need to be coming to work with a smile and we try to, to accomplish that by automating this this job.
Allen Hall: Joel, if I had a tension a thousand bolts a day on Monday, I don't, not sure. I would be going back on Tuesday, would you?
Joel Saxum: No. And I think of that on Saturday and Sunday. I'm definitely trying to get as much rest as possible. But if you, but you make this a little bit more, think about the complication here is because as the global fleet.
Grows. Okay. The conversation we just had was about in the factory in a controlled setting. That's one thing, right? Like you can have these into machines like it, it's a good size tool. There's a lot of weight there. There's, you have the classical tensioning tools, like that's.
It's all hydraulic, like there's a lot of things, but it's controlled because you're in a factory, at least you have decent conditions to work in. Even now, see the fleet grow and see what the, the projections are for how many wind turbines are gonna be installed over the next 2, 5, 10, 20 years globally.
This is a problem that you guys are solving for people in the field in a big way, and that's the important part for me, when I talk to technicians and I talk to people in the field. You're lugging this equipment, it's the classical equipment. You're lugging it up there and you're doing this and it's strain and drain on the body.
And then we know that's when the body gets worn down, then the mind gets worn down and that's when HSE in incidents happen and we're trying to reduce all of those things. That's what you guys are working on. When someone goes into the field with this kit what are you guys seeing for the change in the operators or the change in the technicians?
Are they, do they have a big smile on their face when they see something like this?
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. They, at least when we see them with our stuff in their hands, then they smile a lot. Yes. But no the bottom line is that the, this tool says, so for 42 attention tool, you are looking at 1520 kilograms.
With some electric motors on it, and that goes up to 50 kilograms or 60 for M 72 tensioner.
Allen Hall: That's a hundred pounds Joel in America. That's a very heavy tool.
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. So you need to carry that along, let's say 150 bolts in a flinch, and that's one flange. Exactly. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. And so like you, you go to an onshore turbine, say even your flange bolts, you have bolts on the foundation, then you have.
A lot of times, four to five tower sections, those all have to be bolted together.
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. Something like that. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. And now, and then you talk up in the nelle and you're, you have the blade bolts that have to get attention and all kinds of things. So like you said, 600 different connections that need to be worked on.
So that was
Martin Kristelijn: Let's say our starting point heavy tooling. And we thought, okay, how can we make these tools weightless for the operators and move them fast from one ball to the other? Because that's also a thing you need to move it fast from one bolt to the other to complete your 150 bolts in time because in the end before dark, you want to go home, you need to finish the bolt bolts.
So what we did there is we designed a very specific lift trolley. It's very low and compact, very lightweight as well. So you should have let's say less problems with passing obstacles. For example, you have the stairs in the wind turbine and due to our low trolley design, it usually should go underneath the stairs.
So you're not bothered by that. And it makes attention to weightless. If you combine. That literally with the automated tensioning tool we made. Yeah. Then you have an unbeatable system.
Allen Hall: Yeah. So that's what in two machines has done, and your team over there are mechanical geniuses. You actually make the tension tool quasi weightless by using mechanical means.
So you've designed. Very smart systems tools in which the tension tool adapts into to make it so much easier to do. And we're gonna put some of these tensioning tool improvement devices, I'll call them on the YouTube version so people can see them. But the simplest version of this is the trolley.
And maybe Martin, you can describe what this thing is because. It's a little hard to see. We'll put it on YouTube, obviously. But for those listening, what does the trolley do in terms of the tensioning unit?
Martin Kristelijn: First of all it needs to operate in a very r rugged environment as a wind turbine.
So it needs to be super, super simple. It needs to be super robust and easy to maintain. We took, design. It's made of steel, galvanized steel, so you can hit it with a hammer and it should still work. Then we made some nice interface brackets that you can just hang your attention to in the trolley.
Okay,