Bolt & Beautiful - To reduce costs and increase bolting safety for future large wind turbines

The industry has indicated a strong need to improve the assessment methods for ring flange connections, considering design, manufacturing and maintenance aspects. Especially regarding larger turbines, larger tolerances for flange imperfections are advisable in order to reduce the enormous effort in production and installation with current tolerances. This requires an optimisation of the existing calculation models and the development of measurement concepts to ensure the reliability of the ring flange connection even for larger tolerances.

Therefore, we are even more pleased to announce the start of the project Bolt & Beautiful, which aims to answer precisely these research questions. Some exciting tasks are ahead of us. Fortunately, we have a large team of excellent partners at our side. The Institute for Steel Construction will contribute with fatigue tests on studs and further to support with our great experience on fatigue behaviour of steels components.

Research patners:

• TU Delft
• TNO
• TU Eindhoven
• Institut für Stahlbau, Leibniz Universität Hannover

For more information on the project and our partners, please use the following link.