IntoMachines: Smarter Turbine Bolt Tensioning

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, and we have just a very simple gas spring, which compensates the weight of the tension tool.

Allen Hall: Okay? So now when you’re putting together tower sections, if you have this trolley that’s holding the tension tool, and so the technician is just using almost no force to lift the tension tool, make the tension tool do its thing and move it to the next bolt.

That I’ve watched that tool on your LinkedIn page, it is quite remarkable how fast that tool is. Just by making it more mobile and taking some of the weight away from the technician, that technician is much more productive.

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, absolutely. If you have the trolley and then you have our smart tensioning system it is motorized.

So the tension tool comes from our partner Tension Pro. They’re very good at making tension tools. So we partnered up with them and we said, Hey, let’s make a kick ass product which we call the quantum Smart Tensioner. So they are very good at making tensioners. We are very good in developing user-friendly software and mechatronics.

So electric motors put that all together in the quantum system. And the basis for the quantum system, again, is a super robust system. Easy to maintain, easy to operate, and it yeah, no bells and whistles, let’s say. And so you don’t want it to break down. It needs to be a usable for practical people.

Let’s say, Ellen, if I take you in a wind turbine, I want to give you our quantum system. I will give you a 15 minute explanation, and then it’s so easy to operate that you can do the bolting works for us.

Allen Hall: Wow, that’s impressive because I’m probably not very good at that job. Martin, that Martin, that’s a big task you just took on.

But I have watched it. I’ve watched your videos and I do think I could do it.

Martin Kristelijn: I think so too, because I really believe in our content. Quantum system, so I really think you could do it for us.

Allen Hall: That tool is universal. It can be used in any tower, essentially anywhere. To speed up that process to get bolts, tensioned, and have all the quality data that you need, and to know that tower section has been properly installed now.

I’ve seen some more advancements on LinkedIn. I saw this little robot that was crawling around doing bolt tensioning, and it just blew my mind and that’s why I reached out to you like, whoa, okay, this is life altering for people. You wanna explain what that next generation is from the trolley up to this sort of crawling robot tensioning tool?

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, absolutely. So our vision for the bold tensioning markets is that we want to speed up the process. To tension all those bolts quicker for the coming turbines and also to prevent any loose bolts. You do that by documenting each bolted connection. So we register the pressure, we register the nut angle, we register at the nut torque, we register the boat number.

All that stuff is nicely registered in a A PDF document. However if you can speed it up even more by using a robotic system, that’s our end goal. At the moment we are developing a autonomous bolt tensioning robot for blade bolts. So it’s it’s working in an cell factory there.

It’s just crawling around the hip. Tensioning all the bolts one by one. And then we develop we develop the quantum system in such a way that for the near future, let’s say yeah, coming year you can have the quantum system with a literally, and then a technician will operate it.

But that same quantum smart tensioner in one year, if we’ve launched the robot for, field usage. You can place that same quantum smart tensioner inside our robot and have a fully automated and autonomous bolt tensioning system.

Joel Saxum: I think an important thing to touch on here, Martin, is what the developments that you guys are doing.

We, when we said it earlier you’re experts in software, me and mechatronics. I’ve been around the robotics industry in wind, in oil and gas and sub-C, oil and gas. The best pieces of kit that come out that do that automated process or automate a task are ones like exactly like in two machines has created here that are robust and simple to operate.

There’s way too many tools out there that require a software engineer to be on site to do these things, right? Like when autonomous drones first came out for inspections in turbines. You would see three people at the base of the turbine and two of those people were literally software engineers, like going through code and fixing things and people got a little bit turned off by ’em ah, I can’t be doing this.

Or, I’ve been on sub c oil and gas projects before where you gotta. Fly an ROV technician, a mechatronics expert in from Norway for $2,500 a day to solve this problem that’s happening in Nigeria. Like you can’t have that, like that. That is a barrier to entry for robotics in this space.

You guys have taken the leap past that you’ve made it simple. You’ve made it robust, you’ve made it tough. You’ve made it so that people can operate these things without having a, a year long training course, and that you guys don’t have to be there to do it for them. So I think that’s one of the most important things to get across here for people that are listening, is if you want to make your operations more efficient in the field, if you want to have good data tracking for the tension that you’ve done.

Into machines has done the hard work, they’ve done the legwork to get to that stage. So I guess a question for you then, Martin, is what does it look like? What’s your track record in the field? How many of these things, how many bolts have you guys tensioned? What does it look like?

Martin Kristelijn: I have to say the product has launched quite recently.

We have several customers that say who are using the system. And the feedback we get back from them is indeed yeah, compared to what they had is that it’s faster and easier to operate, but also that we and that’s very difficult to have to say that we don’t have a lot of sensors. We don’t have difficult software.

So it’s all straightforward to operate what I said with 15 minutes, I can teach Alan how to tension a flinch altogether with the quantum system. Yeah we really went back to basic. We stripped all the unnecessary stuff from it, which could break down. We took it off and only the bare minimum we kept such that the guys in the field that they need to use it every day, that they’re also happy to use it.

And indeed they don’t need to read the user manual every day before they start a job. That’s not what we want.

Allen Hall: You must be the technician’s best friend after they use that tool for a day or two. They must love into machines.

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. Yeah. We, yeah, actually we always say what I said, we always go go away with the smile from our turbines and the guys trying our our equipment as well.

So that’s always really good feedback.

Joel Saxum: I think there’s something to be said there too for the global problem that we have, I in, in the wind world is technician shortage, right? And so we’ve talked to Alan and I’ve talked to quite a few people working in this space. How do we tackle this problem?

How can we get more training, get more people in here? One of the things that we can ensure that we can do is make it easier for the technicians in the field to get up to speed fast, to be able to get a task done without having to have five years of experience to figure out how to do it. So now you can bring someone that’s fairly green to the industry.

They’ve got their safety certifications. They know what they’re doing. They know their way around a turbine, but now they can be. The torque or the, I would say the torque tensioning technician, but I’ll say the tensioning tech technician. But they can do it in a relatively short amount of time, so that helps the overall industry and or, an ISP or an EPC contract or whatever it is, scale their workforce up faster to get more projects done.

With high quality at speed, and that’s what we want. That’s the, you guys are doing, you’re doing the hard work, the heavy lifting for the industry.

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. That was for us also one key factor to make this thing work. Because what I said, we are a relatively new player into machines is now five years old.

And yeah, we set together with tension problem. We said, okay, in order to make this work. It’s you should be operated, be able to operate it within that 15 minutes and maybe, okay, maybe it takes you half an hour, but then you really are up to speed with the system and you yeah you just can go for it.

So speed is really really important for us.

Allen Hall: So where is in two machines at, on the planet at the moment? I know you’re all over Europe. Are you in the States? Are you in Australia or are you in South America?

Martin Kristelijn: Our office is based in the Netherlands. So that, that’s Europe. Then we have some systems in Europe itself.

We have some systems in Asia, and we’re now looking in looking for the US So we have some, some talks there to to launch the product.

Allen Hall: I could see a lot of opportunity in the United States, and Joel and I have been to some of those places and watched bolts being assembled manually.

It just seemed like an arduous process. And because I, I think a lot of operators have not seen you in, a lot of technicians haven’t seen you. They need to get to your website and check this out. Where do they go?

Martin Kristelijn: The first thing they go is to into machines.com. That I see some product videos of us had to get a feel of how it looks, how it works, the products.

So the lift trolleys the quantum system, quantum Smart Tensioner, as well as the fully autonomous tensioning robot. And we have a very active LinkedIn page into machines where you can see also videos inside wind turbines where we have the trolleys. The lift rolls and also the robots jumping around on a flinch.

So that’s that’s the stuff you want to see.

Allen Hall: Martin, if I wanna demo one of your robotic assistants and make tensioning so much easier, how do I do that? Can I get my hands on the tool to try it out?

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, you can. So the first thing you do or you can do is send us an email sales@intomachines.com.

Then we we’ll arrange, a demo for you and the second is send us a DM on the link LinkedIn page. Then we we’ll also organize a demo and an online call to answer all the questions.

Allen Hall: And once you try it, you’re going to want to buy it because that tool is gonna save you a tremendous amount of time.

And so you need to check out into machines.com if you wanna see all the wonderful things that Martin and his team has designed. Martin, you’re always coming up with really cool ideas and putting ’em into action and saving the wind industry. Tremendous amount of labor and time and effort in making the job simpler, which is what we need to do.

So congratulations, really good tools.

Martin Kristelijn: Thank you very much for that.

Allen Hall: And thanks for being on the podcast. We love having you on.

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, I also loved speaking to you about about these topics. Really nice.