Everything about this team of Moldovan engineers is unexpected and eccentric in a way. Their name – InformBusiness – doesn’t even suggest what they do. They have production facilities in the basement of a normal building on Calea Ieşilor in Chisinau, and a trolleybus line descends from the urban network, on the pole, to the unseen basement where these engineers work. But it is there, in the basement, that innovation, research and development work takes place, where there are testing laboratories and where current production takes place. It is a factory that is very unlikely to have ever heard of if you are not part of an industry they target, but the team here in Chisinau has left its mark on their work in over 120 cities around the world, in public transport in those cities!
Vitalie Eşanu, the company’s co-founder and CEO, for the last 30 years, has managed to attract talent and inspire a team of people in gowns, with glasses on their faces and screwdrivers in hand, skilled in software and hardware, exactly as the super-talented engineers.
Informbusiness engineers design and produce the core technology of modern urban public transport – from trolleybuses and trams, which use city wires, to modern trains and even electric buses. They are also the ones who invented the concept of the hybrid trolleybus – or the trolleybus that can continue its movement based on the batteries on board and then charge them from the wires, which allows such trolleybuses to reach more distant areas, such as the suburbs, cities, without the need for wire drawing, or even in the historic centres of cities, where wire drawing would not be feasible. Those living in Chisinau and its suburbs may have already acknowledged that such a concept is used in the Moldovan capital, but few know for sure that it was first widely used in Moldova, and has already spread in many cities of the world.
The company itself was founded in 1990 and initially, engineers wanted to make both software and microelectronics, and in the early years, their fields of activity were varied. The key moment when trolleybuses began to be targeted occurred in 2000. It was a time of acute crisis for the public transport system in Chisinau, which was in debt and could not even pay for the electricity consumed. Vitalie Eşanu occasionally met with the head of the urban electric transport company, who was overwhelmed with worries and asked Vitalie why they, skilled engineers, do nothing to drastically reduce the consumption of trolleybuses so that the company can survive in times of crisis. It was a rhetorical question, but it sparked in the minds of Moldovan engineers and started a whole chain of events that brought the team to where it is today.
Engineers began to study the problem and soon identified that the trolleybuses of the time were wasting too much energy through resistors and heat emanation, due to simplistic management of electric motors, poor recovery and old and cumbersome hardware, which put in motion the power developed by the trolleybus electrometer. So they developed a new model that replaced all those management components. The trolleybuses remained the same, with the same electric motor, but 1.5 tons of old resistors and relays were removed from them and replaced with a 42 kg box, which replaced all the functions of the old equipment with modern hardware and smart software. The first 3 trolleybuses in Chisinau, which were equipped with such boxes in 2001, demonstrated a huge efficiency: total consumption reduced by 35-40%!
The process of modifying the trolleybuses in Chisinau has continued, and the efficiency they gained has intrigued several managers of transport companies in neighbouring countries. The city of Vinnitsa in Ukraine was the first where the team of engineers exported its concept in 2003. A batch of 16 trolleybuses was transformed in 2 weeks then. Interest continued to grow, with requests from more and more cities. In 2004, for example, they installed their upgraded system on 18 trolleybuses in St. Petersburg, Russia. All those 18 trolleybuses are still in motion today, after 17 years, without major reliability problems!
That’s how the team of engineers gained a reputation and started modifying old trolleybuses to make them more efficient. But in the meantime, they have also become suppliers to several trolleybus factories, delivering their modules to be installed from the start on the new trolleybuses. Nowadays, their components are delivered to factories in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and through intermediate suppliers, and to other manufacturers around the world. Today’s geography of trolleybuses containing the concept of the Moldovan team of engineers includes over 120 cities around the world.
The small team of engineers from Moldova provides a similar concept of efficiency for train and tram locomotives, but in the meantime, they were also the ones who pioneered in an unexpected field, hybrid trolleybuses. The idea arose as a necessity to connect the suburbs of big cities by trolleybus, but without the high costs of drawing trolleybus lines to those destinations for tens of kilometres. They thought that if they solved the problem, trolleybuses to suburbs and central areas would be a more environmentally friendly and cheaper solution than buses or transport. That’s how they came up with the idea of installing a set of batteries behind the trolleybuses, which would store the energy needed for them to travel with the pillars lowered. The requirement for Chisinau was that the range is at least 20 km, but their system has a real-life range of 60-70 km. And the best part is that these batteries do not need to be parked for a long time to be charged – they are charged directly on the go, by recovery and energy from the grid when the pylons are reconnected.
In addition, the Moldovan team wants to innovate further and is currently the contracted partner of the MAZ plant in Belarus on the R&D side for the development of the future 9-meter electric bus. It will be a pure electric bus, with batteries, designed for localities with up to 200,000 inhabitants, where their use would be more justified. Currently, there are almost no such buses on the market, the number of cities with such a population is very large around the world, and those cities could be attracted to opt for such buses with zero local emissions. The buses will have a range of 300 km, enough for a full day of operation in such a city. In addition, the Moldovan team is already delivering components to the current larger 12-meter MAZ-produced electric buses.
And all this is happening in Chisinau, in a team in which works engineers who are proud of what they do, already for over 120 cities of the world!
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