New bolts wont help, as the tubes themselves are breaking.
New bolts wont help, as the tubes themselves are breaking.
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It has not been my observations that the ‘tubes are breaking’...that’s not to say it hasn’t happened but I can’t think of any recent examples of that. Once a failure happens, the tubes of course ‘break’ but if I was to go back through numerous IWT failure records, this typically is not the genesis of the failures... it’s usually something else and ‘tube failure’ happens as a secondary thing. If your observations are different than that, I’m very interested to look at any examples of it.
As can be summarized from some of my other posts here, there are many failure mechanisms but the fatigue of tower flange bolts is the most common one. Fatigue as a failure mechanism primarily depends on two things... how stressed something is and how many cycles it is put through (simplified for the purpose of this discussion). Thus by inference, changing out the bolts is absolutely required at some point since this restarts the clock on counting the number of stress cycles. Having said that, there are many failure mechanisms... and preventive measures such as changing out the bolts doesn’t reset the clock on anything else.