HYLIION: 3D Printed Power Plant of the Future

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Oh, man. We're at Hyliion, and this company right here is a new type of company. You've never seen something like this before, [music] and it can only exist because of the advancements in manufacturing and 3D printing. The future is going to be run on power, massive power. AI data centers, factories, military operations, remote sites, and navy vessels at sea all need energy wherever they are. We're about 3 hours from the Titans of CNC headquarters where Hyliion is building the Karno power module, a 3D printed fuel-flexible power plant designed to deliver electricity without any dependence on the grid. This is the future of energy, and it's being built right here in Texas.

[00:00:46]>> This is the actual system. Yeah.

[00:00:49]>> so good.

[00:00:49]>> So, this is the Karno core. The And this goes into the power module. Uh so, this is what, you know, we say is reinventing the way electricity is made. It's based off this 200-year-old Stirling engine concept that uh has always been this euphoria idea, but never actually commercialized. And we're bringing it to data centers. We're doing work with the military. So, the military's brand new latest and greatest unmanned autonomous ship as this is actually going to be the power plant on board that ship. Uh and then we're doing just things like commercial buildings and moving them off of being reliant on grid electricity.

[00:01:23]>> So, like bringing power to exactly pinpoint where it's needed.

[00:01:27]>> Exactly.

[00:01:27]>> So, here is where we're actually reacting the fuels. You bring air and fuel in, you react it, then that heat is transferred into this part. You can actually see the heat stanchion there.

[00:01:38]So, you transfer the heat in, but this is where we're actually heating up the helium, and that gas is expanding.

[00:01:45]Then from there, it pushes a piston array that way. Or as you could see on this end, this is the actual push the piston being pushed on. So, it gets pushed that way, and then as soon as that gas once it does that pushing motion, the gas actually flows through these tubes into the cold side or the chiller. And in here, the helium is actually uh flowing through these tubes that are surrounded by a radiator glycol loop of uh cooling water. And then the gas gets cool cooled down and it contracts. And then that's what pulls the piston back this way. So, you're actually pushing on one end while you're contracting on the other side as well. So, this is our product. This is designed to be a 200 kW box. Inside you've got this four-shaft system, the Stirling engine. But now we'll start looking at some of like the cross-sections and what's actually happening on the inside. So, here in the reactor, an additive made part, is where we mix fuel and air together. And then think of that, it's like a big flamethrower almost. It's throwing heat against these tubes that have helium moving back and forth through them. And then that's what's causing the gas to actually expand. And when that happens, it pushes the piston that way. And then when the gas contracts, it pulls the piston back. But you're also doing the opposite reaction on the other side. And then in the center here, you've got your magnets moving back and forth. And then your copper wound on the outside, and that's what's actually making electricity. Now we'll move over to a single shaft that we've got some of the parts taken apart here so you can actually see what it looks like on the inside. But uh so this is the linear electric motor. So, in here is just wound copper. There's magnets that are sliding through the shaft. So, this is what's actually producing the electricity.

[00:03:32]And then you've got a piston array here on this end. Now, you've got that same exact piston that's sitting inside of this this end. And that's connected on a single shaft with magnets on it. So, if this piston's moving to the right, the this one's moving as well. It you know, moves as a single part. That's the only moving part in this entire engine. So, you've got that one shaft oscillating back and forth. Even that is riding on gas bearings or air bearings. So, there's no actual systems touching or there's no, you know, touching interface between it. There's no oils, no lubricants.

[00:04:08]>> Exactly. And then that's shifting back and forth. These here are the tubes that are actually getting heated up by the the flame by your reacting the the fuel and air together. And inside these tubes is where your helium is actually flowing back and forth and getting heated up.

[00:04:25]Most people don't appreciate it. It's almost like a hydraulic system. Like when that gas is expanding on this end, it's actually applying 4,000 lb of force or about the weight of an elephant onto this piston to push it that way and then we extract all that through electricity.

[00:04:41]>> This thing is just moving.

[00:04:43]And you said 20 times per second, right?

[00:04:46]>> How heavy is that?

[00:04:47]>> And it's not touching anything, so there's no friction.

[00:04:49]>> Right.

[00:04:51]How heavy is that?

[00:04:52]>> That shaft moving back and forth about 60 lb, but most of the weight is actually in the magnets. So, we designed the piston, the actual shaft to be as light as possible because any more mass there is that we need to move that's waste, right? But you need to have magnets in order to move them through the coils to produce electricity. And best way to think of that, it's like regen braking in an electric car, right?

[00:05:15]When we're pushing on this piston, this electric motor is doing regen braking.

[00:05:20]Actually trying to slow those magnets down, capture all that electricity, and feed that to the building or whatever we're powering. So, then moving to the question of like, all right, well, why do you need additive manufacturing? Cuz like our business model says you could never make this through conventional manufacturing. Like if additive additive didn't exist, we wouldn't have a product. So, this is one of our kind of critical components. This is actually our cold side or a chiller in the system. And you You see here we've got, you know, all these critical machine surfaces.

[00:05:48]>> So, what's the material?

[00:05:49]>> Uh it's aluminum silicon 10.

[00:05:51]>> How much time to actually print this one?

[00:05:54]>> Yes, this one's roughly about a week.

[00:05:55]And so, what we're able to do with additive is really harness the you know, the design freedom uh specifically with heat exchangers. So, the system is a is a heat engine. At a high level, essentially all you need is a hot and a cold side. And so, what's key with that is heat exchanger design. And so, with additive we can do, you know, complex tube arrays that you can eventually can't manufacture. What we're able to do is actually make it all one piece additively.

[00:06:19]>> So, everything's 3D printed and then you have to create all the sealing surfaces.

[00:06:23]>> Correct.

[00:06:24]>> Pretty much.

[00:06:24]>> We we still have to machine things cuz you know, you're not going to hit tolerances you need for sealing with additive manufacturing.

[00:06:31]>> So, in getting this taking a week, >> Yeah.

[00:06:35]>> how was it getting to the point of getting beautiful parts without porosity and and just not like trouble-free? Did you guys go through a nice >> Oh, yeah.

[00:06:44]>> learning curve on that?

[00:06:45]>> Absolutely. So, uh what we actually do before we fully commit to the design, we'll do coupon builds.

[00:06:50]Um so, you know, one of the challenges with uh the system is we actually we use helium as our our working media gas. It lends itself very nicely to gas stirrings um for many reasons, but the challenge with that is the sealing and keeping, you know, things from not cross talking. Um so, we want to make sure we have, you know, good sealing from helium to our coolant side. So, there's many parameters that, you know, you can tweak. Uh similar like a CNC machine, but for the printers uh to dial in, you know, the the porosity and all.

[00:07:21]>> Are you printing your threads?

[00:07:23]>> No.

[00:07:24]>> putting the helicoils in or are you tap them afterwards?

[00:07:26]>> No, so we print them to like a tap drill size and then we'll go thread mill them and then put a helicoil in.

[00:07:31]>> This is like the prime example of why we need additive manufacturing. So, as you can see, these are all super small passageways that we actually have exhaust gas flowing one way, we have our inlet air flowing the other way. So, you're actually dumping all the heat from your exhaust back into your inlet air, so you actually keep it in the system. And passageways like that, you could never make that through conventional subtractive manufacturing.

[00:07:56]>> We've got a whole slew of different size machines. We pretty much have every variant that Concept Laser Additive offers. Uh including some of the ones they've sunset. Traditionally, they were Concept Laser and Arcam.

[00:08:10]GE decided to vertically integrate and acquire these companies. And so, but we've got pretty much almost every generation from really small like university size machines all the way up to their big production machines.

[00:08:25]>> Very cool.

[00:08:26]>> So, what we like to do is we'll take the small ones, go develop the recipe on those, and then we release that to our big boys that go do mass production for us. So, what we got here is our big production machine. These are four lasers, so we can do four parts at one time. A lot of our shafting, the four shaft assembly you're seeing, multiple four really helps us, right? So, we usually have eight of each component, so four is like that perfect size for fitting them on there.

[00:08:53]>> You got and they're all named.

[00:08:55]>> Yes, everyone's Everyone's got their own little like personality, I'd say. So, we usually let it run for a little bit before we name them just to figure out like what's this guy's quirks about him.

[00:09:05]>> you you uh stay politically correct by not putting female names on them.

[00:09:09]>> We got a couple in the back. We got a couple in the back.

[00:09:12]>> Between all these machines, the real only difference is some are made for cobalt chromium and some are made for aluminum. Outside of that, the different machines can print any of our cobalt chromium parts, right? So, for instance, this is one of the uh earlier generation machines. You see it's got the smaller build plate, and this is making the heater part.

[00:09:33]Then the next generation machine is this size build plate. You can put two of the parts on it at once. And then the latest and greatest machines are this size build plate, which you can actually fit four of those parts at once. And as you go from one machine to the next, you have more lasers. So like this this machine actually has four lasers that are going around making the parts versus the one on the end only has two lasers in the machine.

[00:10:01]>> I know a lot of people use EDM to actually get the parts off the build plate.

[00:10:06]What process do you guys use?

[00:10:07]>> Yeah, so we're doing EDM as well.

[00:10:09]And that'll take the parts off and then we have to bring them the actual build plate back through a machining process to make sure it's flat for the next print. This build plate here is actually the factory acceptance test build plate.

[00:10:23]And so when we commission a new machine, we got to make sure the lasers are all calibrated correctly, the powder's being laid out correctly.

[00:10:30]>> That's a lot of shapes.

[00:10:31]>> Yeah.

[00:10:32]>> Hey, shout out to Dre. Hey, this is what we do in our shop right here. Boom, this thing actually rotates up, flips around, shakes, and actually gets all the powder out of the the parts and stuff. What's what's cool is you actually look and it's got these air nozzles, right? So it's almost like in manufacturing where you actually have like tooling and fixturing holes [music] and stuff to to actually grab it. But you say that's actually to get the the powder out of the parts, huh?

[00:10:59]>> Yeah, so >> thinking ahead.

[00:11:00]>> If you don't get all the powder out, the part's ruined, right? Once that goes through heat treatment, that powder will cure and if those passageways aren't open, it's a waste of part. So what the technicians can do is hook up an air chuck and nozzle right into the part and blow it out as it's going through this depowdering process.

[00:11:18]>> Very cool.

[00:11:19]>> But then once you put it through machining, [music] that part falls off and it's gone and you just end up with the actual final part you wanted.

[00:11:25]>> I've never seen somebody actually do that. So that's just thinking ahead and being smart right there.

[00:11:30]Super cool.

[00:11:31]>> So these are actually our carno power modules. So, this is what a customer would have sitting on their site. Our carno core, the additive machine system will actually sit right here at the base. And then, you know, the whole concept is like it's a fully self-contained box. So, all you do is feed fuel in and then it's going to provide you with electricity. It's designed to be a truly fuel agnostic system. So, you could put natural gas, propane, hydrogen, diesel. The same exact generator system can run on all those different fuels cuz once again, it's just heat that's powering it, right? So, as long as we can react to fuel, we can make heat out of it. That seems so crazy to me. Like, but I'm not educated on it. Are there other systems that have the same do the same thing or is you guys are special in that way? Yeah, it's that's special to us. I mean, there are other systems that can take multiple fuels, but like true fuel agnostic where you could be running on natural gas, not even turn the system off and just start pumping in hydrogen or propane or various fuels. Like, that's pretty unique. Like, we haven't found anything else like it. And then, right down here, uh you can see where our electricity will actually come out. And so, the whole pitch to the customer is give us fuel, fully self-contained, low maintenance box, super high efficiency, and we'll give you electrons out. And everything else is contained inside.

[00:12:53]This is our air intake. You've got some of the exhaust system. You've got your radiator system. So, this is just like a radiator in your car car. It's a glycol loop that then that glycol's running through that chiller part of the carno, cooling that helium down and causing it to compress.

[00:13:09]>> All made pretty local?

[00:13:10]>> Um in the US primarily, but across the US. This system here is actually property of the Office of Navy Research and it's actually going to be deployed at a navy base to power one of their facilities. So, it's been a wild journey.

[00:13:25]So, when I was in college at Carnegie Mellon studying mechanical engineering and my vision was let's go electrify semi trucks. So, the big 18 wheelers, move them off the diesel, move them to electric.

[00:13:36]Launched the company on that idea. Uh, we 5 years in we actually took it public on the New York Stock Exchange. Perfect timing. It was like 2021, tons of momentum into EV stocks. Our market cap shot up to being a $10 billion company.

[00:13:50]All right, so we're like a 5-year-old early stage company worth $10 million.

[00:13:55]It was publicly traded.

[00:13:57]And then those markets changed, right?

[00:13:58]EVs became less attractive, there became headwinds, the regulatory mandates were softening and uh, and it was just this bad news storm being created to a point where our stock price just continued to trade down to a point where we were at at our low, we were about 50 cents a share. And at that point we said, all right, well, we've got this EV business, but we also have this power gen business that we acquired out of GE initially because we wanted to charge the batteries of the truck with this technology. But we said, let's shut down this part of the business. We That was like a 70% reduction in force. So, I mean, this was This is like a total company pivot. And uh, for the last few years we've gone all into power gen.

[00:14:41]Thankfully, the stock has recovered some, but still, you know, it's only trading at a couple of dollars. So, we we got a long way to go from where we want to be.

[00:14:49]Uh, but it's kind of this regrowth rebirth of an organization.

[00:14:52]>> These machines all get different names, right? And so, we just recently took delivery of a another machine and on their uh, X line. And yesterday we were trying to figure out, all right, what are we going to name this machine? So, we got a little surprise for you. Our latest X line machine is going to be named the Titan.

[00:15:11]>> Man, it better be the best one you have, though.

[00:15:13]>> [laughter] >> So, here you go. Here is uh, your named machine.

[00:15:17]>> Boom, right there.

[00:15:19]So, it's so good. It better be the best machine in the place, though.

[00:15:23]>> Perfect parts every time.

[00:15:24]>> Perfect parts. Boom. It's like the future of power right here in Texas in the US. So, what's your plans like?

[00:15:30]What's the future look like?

[00:15:32]>> Yeah, so we really see this as this is how electricity should be made. Now, granted we're at the early innings, right? Last year we just started delivering to the Navy. This year we're starting to deliver to commercial customers. And then '27 is where we want to start ramping up production. And as you said, the cool thing is we can build all this right here in America.

[00:15:49]>> it. And then you're you're hiring more Americans, you're manufacturing right here, and with a new product that never existed.

[00:15:57]>> And and one that for 200 years we've known this is the way to do it, but it wasn't possible till additive manufacturing.

[00:16:04]>> So good. And just like it's written up on the wall, changing the world, man.

[00:16:08]>> Absolutely.

[00:16:09]>> You have a great team, you have a great facility, man. Congratulations.

[00:16:12]>> Thank you.

[00:16:13]>> Thanks for having us, man.