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...