Pete Andrews from EchoBolt discusses their advanced ultrasonic technology for inspecting and maintaining wind turbine bolts, which can reduce maintenance costs by up to 90%. He emphasizes the importance of proper bolt tensioning during installation and highlights recent improvements in their automated inspection processes.
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Allen Hall: With wind turbines growing larger and critical bolted connections under strain, the wind industry needs smarter inspection methods to prevent costly failures. This week we speak with Pete Andrews, managing director at EchoBolt. EchoBolt has developed ultrasonic technology that makes bolt inspections faster, more reliable, and saves wind farm operators up to 90% on maintenance costs while preventing catastrophic failures. Stay tuned.
Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.
Pete, welcome back to the show.
Pete Andrews: Hi, Allen. Hi Joel. Good to be back. I was trying to work out when I was last on here, but it was it two years ago. It's been a while. Anyway, we've had a lot change at alt yeah, it's good to catch up with you guys again.
Allen Hall: It's been too long and so we're glad to have you back because I know there's been a lot of improvements and EchoBolt has been really busy checking bolts all over the place and we've, Joel and I have been traveling around quite a bit and we've noticed problems with.
Bolts in the United States and we think where's Pete? Where's Ebol? We could really use you in the United States to help us on some of these bolted connections because it does seem like there's a lot of issues from tower bolts to blade bolts to bolts in general, there are a number of problems that exist.
And I wanna start off there, Pete, because I think you're the knowledge base for bolts. Are bolts being tightened correctly based upon all the measurements that you have done?
Pete Andrews: Say, it's a very mixed picture. I think you're right to point out, it's every wind operator will have issues in their fleets with the bolt of connections, but it's almost always.
Blade studs that caused the most headache. You do see things on towers. You do see a kind of occasional issues elsewhere, maybe with foundations. I'd say it's probably, I. In our experience, once, once sites are in operation, there's not too much that happens that influences the integrity. An awful lot happens at the point of installation, and it's what we always try and say to customers if it.
If you confirm that the bolts are tightened to the load, you expect at the point of installation, you've set yourself up for a fantastic operational li life. But if it's wrong at the start, you've got embedded integrity issues that are really hard to manage going forward. So yeah it's a mixed picture, but what I'd always say is focus on the QA at the point of installation and things should go easy from there on in.
Allen Hall: It does seem like blade bolts are becoming more of an issue. As you mentioned, the blade insert question of are we over tightening fasteners that go into the blades and pulling out these inserts and causing some of the problems downstream root cracking, instruments becoming loose, blades becoming loose and wobbling on the pitch bearings.
It does seem like we don't have a really good way of consistently tightening or tensioning. Those fasteners are bolts that are in composite structure just a lot more sensitive to or the composites more sensitive to the tensioning tightening that happe...