Hyliion’s story is one of opportunity. Opportunity embraced rather than avoided.
The company was founded over a decade ago with a clear mission. CEO Thomas Healy had earned a Mechanical Engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon and had identified potential in a business that helped transition 18-wheel semi-trucks from diesel to electric.
In 2020, this ‘stereotypical start-up journey’ was given the chance to accelerate via a $1.5b SPAC-enabled public listing, and the following year, GE Aerospace were in touch to gauge Hyliion’s interest in entering a new field, commercialising an in-development technology, and adopting an additive manufacturing workflow that would be completely new to the company.
Though a daunting prospect, the timing was good. Six years into the company’s electric vehicle (EV) efforts, Hyliion’s hierarchy was becoming less certain in its future as an EV entity.
“We saw that the EV space was not heading in a good direction,” Healy told the Additive Insight podcast. “A lot of our peers were going bankrupt, it was tough to raise capital, the pace at which fleets were adopting new electric vehicles was slowing down, costs were higher, the mandates were softening.”
The deal to acquire GE Aerospace’s KARNO power generation technology was completed in 2022 at a very palatable $37m, and rather than make KARNO an element of the business, Hyliion has ‘gone all in’ on the technology.
Today, it presents itself as a power generation company and has taken KARNO from the midst of a product development phase to a commercialised product. When GE sold the technology in 2022, it had iterated on the design of the first KARNO product three times. Hyliion went through another couple of iteration cycles before launching the KARNO 200 kilowatt power module to market.
This product is a linear heat generator that uses heat as a fuel source to produce electricity. The premise, as Healy explains it, is to allow users of the KARNO 200 kilowatt power module to make their own electricity on site, rather than being reliant on the grid.
“For data centres where the grid doesn’t have the capacity that data centres need, now they can move to on-site power generation, and move faster than they could before,” Healy explained. “If you look at a shopping mall, it enables them to make their own electricity cheaper than buying grid electricity. And then if you look at applications like the military, we’re the power plant on board the new unmanned military ship.”
Hyliion is also in the process of developing power generation solutions that can deliver megawatts of power, with the technology said to be inherently scalable.
The challenge, if there is one, is the method of manufacture. Additive manufacturing was the preferred method of manufacture at GE Aerospace, and has remained so subsequent to the transition into Hyliion. Technically, the complexity of the heat exchangers means you’d struggle to make the product any other way, but what Hyliion is also having to content with is the size of AM machine build volumes.
Hyliion’s 200kW KARNO module has been designed to fit within the 250 x 250 mm build plate size of its Colibrium Additive M2 system (one of the older generations of the machine). There are M Line and X Line machines in operation at Hyliion – both of which boast bigger build volumes than the M2 – but while development on larger modules is ongoing, users with significant power generation needs are being serviced with multiple 200kW units ‘strung together’ like an EV car battery pack. That works out as one unit per build on the M2 machines, two units per build on the X Line, and four units per build on the M Line.
As Healy explains on the Additive Insight podcast, the KARNO power generation products work similarly to Stirling engines, whereby a heating and cooling process is carried out 20 times per second. When the gas inside the chamber is heated, it drives a piston to generate electricity. The cooling then resets the cycle.
While this is a 200-year-old class of engine, they have often been difficult to manufacture. Additive manufacturing, however, has been able to tackle the complexity of the design and allow the likes of Hyliion to take these solutions to market.
“These machines are pretty universal in what they can print,” Healy said. “One of the great things about additive is it doesn’t really care if it’s printing a block of metal or an extremely complex part. It’s just lasers going around that are melting layer by layer and building up whatever structure you want. And it behoves you to make as complex a part – obviously, if they have a benefit – as possible.”
Hyliion has managed to commercialise the KARNO power generation technology within just a few years, despite having little-to-no additive manufacturing expertise prior to the KARNO acquisition. When the transaction was complete, however, Hyliion integrated not just the IP, but the team behind the IP. Josh Mook, now the Hyliion CTO, was among the founding members of the KARNO technology within GE and is credited with having assembled a ‘rockstar engineering team’ with ‘the best designers for additive’ in the world as Hyliion looked to bring KARNO to market. This team is not only pushing forward with the development of KARNO products, but as the team grows, working to educate new recruits on Hyliion’s additive manufacturing ‘secret sauces.’
On the latest Additive Insight podcast, Healy goes on to share perspectives on the AM business case for the KARNO power generation technology, building out an internal AM capability, and where he’d like to see AM technology improve.
