Company profile

Bombardier make it easier for people to connect with one another

Bombardier is the world’s only manufacturer of both planes and trains. Looking far ahead while delivering now, Bombardier is evolving mobility worldwide and making it easier for people to connect with one another.

Innovation challenge

Increase pantograph longevity

For many years Bombardier’s has had a wish to increase the longevity of their pantographs, because it is an expensive, cumbersome and dangerous process for their operating customers to replace them, hence longevity really matters.

Outcome

Carbon strip longevity increased by factor 10

Two solutions combined into a breakthrough that increases the carbon strip’s longevity by factor 10 – while also enhancing the lifetime of the contact wire (catenary).

A second solution emerging from the collaborative university competition was so simple by nature that Bombardier did not want to disclose it through patenting. It simply works unnoticed in many cities across the world.

KSF

One of the university teams found the real root cause – triggering the insight that there was nothing wrong with the carbon-strip. The Bombardier R&D team had been looking at the problem too long to se beyond the actual material challenge.

New brains and young generations dare to ask questions that senior experts would not even come up with.