EchoBolt’s BoltWave Makes Bolt Inspections Easy

Pete Andrews from EchoBolt joins to discuss ultrasonic bolt inspection, the Bolt Wave device, and blade stud defect detection. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Pete Andrews: Pete, welcome to the program. Good to be back. Yeah. See you face to face. Yeah. Yes. This is wonderful. It's a really great event to catch it with loads of the. UK innovation that are happening in the supply chain. So it's, yeah, really nice to be here.  Allen Hall: This is really good to meet in person because we have seen a lot of bolt issues in the us, Canada, Australia, yeah. Uh, all around the world and every time bolt problems come up, I say, have you called Pete Andrews and Echo Bolt and gotten the kit to detect bolt issues? And then who's Pete? Give me Pete's phone number. Okay, sure. Uh, but now that we're here in person, a lot has changed since we first talked to you probably two years ago.[00:01:00] You're a bootstrap company based in the UK that has global presence, and I, I think it's a good start to explain what the technology is and why Echo Bolt matters so much in today's world.  Pete Andrews: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, as you said, we're a uk, um, SME, there's a team of 13 of us based here in the uk. Yeah. But we do deliver our services internationally, but really focused on Northern Europe. Yeah. But increasingly we've done more in the US and North America, a little bit in Canada. Um, but our big offering really is to help wind turbine operators and owners reduce the need to routinely retire in bulks. So we have a quick and simple inspection technology that people can deploy, find out the status of their bolt connections, and then. Reti them if necessary, but the vast majority of the time we find that they're static and absolutely fine and can be left [00:02:00] alone. So it's a real big efficiency boost for wind operators.  Joel Saxum: Well, you're doing things by prescription now, right? Instead of just blanket cover, we're gonna do all of this. It's like, let's work on the ones that actually need to be worked on. Let's do the, the work that we actually need to, and instead of lugging, like we're looking at the kit right here, and I can, you can hold the case in one hand, let alone the tools in a couple of fingers. As opposed to torque tensioning tools that are this big, they weigh a hundred kilos, and those come with all of their own problems. So I know that you guys said you're, you're focused here. You do a lot of work, um, in the offshore wind world as well. Yeah. I mean, offshore wind is where you add a zero right? To zeros. Yeah. Everything else is that much more complicated. It costs that much more. It's you're transitioning people offshore to the transition pieces. Like there's so much more HSE risk, dollar risk, all of these different spend things. So. The Echo Bolt systems, these different tools that you have being developed and utilized here first make absolute sense, but now you guys are starting to go to onshore as well.  Pete Andrews: Yeah, that's right. So I mean, as as you said, that there's really [00:03:00] three main benefit areas we focus on. The first one is the health and safety of technicians, right? As you said, some of the fasteners used offshore now are up to MA hundred. So a hundred millimeter diameter bolts,  Joel Saxum: four inches for our American friends. Yeah, absolutely.  Pete Andrews: And they probably weigh. 30 kilos plus per bolt. Yeah. Um, so just the physical manual handling of that sort of equipment and the tightening equipment for those bolts is a huge risk for people. If you think 150 bolts lifting or maneuvering, the tooling around on on its own can cause all the problems. So as well as the inherent risk of the hydraulic kit failing. So occasionally we see catastrophic tool failure. Is, which have really high potential severity, you know, sort of tensioner heads ejecting or crush injuries from Tor. So that is really a key focus for our customers, just to [00:04:00] keep their teams safe, but also you have to be the cost effective and the the major cost benefit we allow is that we don't have to revisit every bolt and every turbine like you'd have to do if you were retyping. So we believe there's something of the order of a million pounds per installed gigawatt saving. By moving from a routine REIT uh, maintenance strategy to a focused condition based inspection, you significantly reduce the amount of intervention you make and keep your turbines running more and reduce the boots on the ground on the turbine. So three real kind of, um, key. Benefits for people adopting our technology  Allen Hall: because we routinely see tower bolts being reworked or retention depending on who the manufacturer is. And I'm watching this go on. I'm like, why are [00:05:00] we doing this? It seems, or the 10% rule, we're tighten 10% this year, and they'll come back and see how it's going. That's a little insane, right, because you're just kind of. Tensioning bolts up to see if one of them has a problem and then you just do more of them and we're wasting so much time because echo bolts figured this out years ago. You don't need to do that. You can tell what the tension is in a bolt ultrasonically, which was the original technology, the first gen I'll call it, uh, that you could tell the length of the bolt. If the length of the bolt is correct within certain parameters, you know that it is tension properly. If it's shrunk, that probably means it's not tensioned properly. That's a huge advantage because you can't physically see it. And I know I've seen technicians go, oh, I could take a hammer and I can tell you which ones are not tensioned properly wrong. Wrong. And I think that's where equitable comes in because you're actually applying a a lot of science simply [00:06:00] to a complex problem because the numbers are so big. Pete Andrews: Yeah, I mean that, that, that's been the real. Driving force between our offering is to simplify it. So ultimately we're based on a non-destructive testing technique. It's an ultrasonic thickness checking technique, but when from the non-destructive testing background, it's crack detection, people have time, they can be, it's a very precision measurement. People have to be trained in the wind industry. We're trying to inspect. A thousand, 2000 bolts a day at scale. It's a completely different, um, ask of the technology and the way the technology has been developed historically has required too much technician expertise, too much configuration and set up time, and hasn't delivered on the, on the speed that's needed to be efficient in wind. And that's where our bolt wave [00:07:00] unit we've, that we've developed over the last. 18 months, let's say, where all of our focus has gone to make it as slick and as easy for a client technician to pick up with minimal training. It's through an iOS interface. Everyone understands it intuitively. Um, it's a bit like using the camera app on your phone. You know, you're just hitting measure, measure, measure, measure, measure 10 seconds a bolt as you move the, um, ultrasonic transducer across, and then the data gets moved. Automatically to the cloud, to our bolt platform. And customers can view it in near real time. The engineer in the office can see the inspections happened. They can see if there are any anomalous bolts, and then there can be communication there and then whether an intervention is necessary. So it's sort of really changed the way our customers think about managing their, um. They're bolted joints.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think these are, these are the kind of innovations that we love to see, right? Because [00:08:00] we regularly talk about a shortage of technicians, and this isn't, I was just learning this this week too, like this is not a wind problem. This is a everywhere problem. No matter what industry you're in. Use are short of technicians. But we're seeing like a tool like this is developed to be able to scale that workforce as well. Right. You don't need to be an NDT level three expert to go and do these things. 'cause there's a very few of those people out there. Right? Right. We know the NDT people, a lot of NDT people, and that's a hard skillset to come by. Yeah. This can be put in the hands of any technician. Yeah, a quick training course. Just, Hey, this is how you use your iPhone. You can check Instagram, right? Yeah. Okay. You can off figure. Yeah, have fun. See you at lunch. Um, but they can, they can make this happen, right? They can go do these inspections and you're getting that, that, uh, data collected in the field. Centralized back to an SME that's looking at it and you don't have to put that SME in the field and try to scale their ability to go and travel and do all these things. They can be in the office making sure that the, the QA, QC is done correctly. I love it. I think that that's the way we need to go with a lot of things. [00:09:00]Uh, and you're making it happen.  Pete Andrews: Yeah. And it's a real kind of. F change in mindset for us. So originally when we started Ebot, we were using third party hardware. Yeah. Which required a bit of that specialism. Yeah. A bit of care about the setup of the project, getting multiple parameters configured before you got going. And it wasn't really something we could put in the hands of a customer.  Joel Saxum: Yeah.  ...