Tech Briefs Magazine - June 2022 - 14

Hyliion Trucks Onward
A hybrid electric system decreases fuel consumption and reduces emissions by capturing wasted energy and storing
it in a battery pack.
A
s a mechanical engineering student at Carnegie Melon,
Thomas Healy wondered why passenger cars
were moving toward electrifi cation, but commercial
trucks were not. That curiosity has led to one of the greenest,
most innovative, trucking concepts on the planet. " I
learned that there had been some electric trucks made,
but at that point they were built on lead acid batteries and
outdated technology by today's standards, " he said.
Even as battery technology improved, Healy knew that
trucks were not going to be fully electric any time soon.
To get anything like the range that of a typical diesel
semi, an electric truck would have to give a third of its
capacity to batteries. " We said, hey, the better mousetrap
here is to create a range extender truck where we actually
bring the power plant with you, and we charge the
batteries as you're going down the road. "
Healy planned to replace the wheel and axle assembly
underneath the trailer (the slider) with an electric
motor driven system. It would capture wasted energy while going
downhill, charging batteries for a boost during acceleration
and uphill travel. With that concept, Hyliion was born. Healy,
now the company's CEO, began entering business plan competitions
and, in 2016, won the Create the Future Design Contest.
Six years later, the company's hybrid powertrain - called the
Hybrid eX - has traversed millions of highways miles. But the
e-axel has moved up from the trailer to the truck itself, to meet
the needs of trucking companies, who often own several trailers
for every tractor. " Fleets were saying, 'Hey, if you just put
this on the tractor, I only have to buy one and I get all the same
benefi ts, " said Healy.w
2016 GRAND PRIZE WINNER
INNOVATOR: Thomas Healy,
CEO, Hyliion
INNOVATION: Hybrid electric
technology for semi-trailers and
the trucking industry.
IMPACT: The system helps truck
fl eets to reduce gas emissions and
fuel costs. Regenerative braking
captures and reuses power to help the truck move uphill.
Last chance to enter our 20th Anniversary
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14
The Hybrid eX, is, arguably, a short-term solution. Companies
that are looking to move away from diesel tend to want to
leapfrog to full electrifi cation, rather than invest in what they
might see as a half-way measure. But an entirely battery powered
truck is, currently, just not feasible. There's the range,
there's charging time, and there's infrastructure. " Right now,
there are very few stations built out in the United States that
can charge a truck at a fast rate - you can probably count them
on a couple of hands, " he said. Constructing a facility that
could charge 100 trucks, for instance, would be like adding 50
manufacturing plants to the grid in a single area.
So, Hyliion created the Hypertruck ERX, which retains the
regenerative braking capabilities of the hybrid but adds a generator
fueled by natural gas to charge the battery as well. " With
natural gas, there are over 700 stations already in existence in
North America. The trucks we are deploying can pull up, fuel
up, and they're back on the road in about 10 minutes, " explained
Healey.
The Hypertruck ERX will go into trials later this year and
Hyliion hopes to have them on the road in the latter half of
2023. Meanwhile, they are getting ready for an eventual shift to
hydrogen. " Batteries today are plenty fi ne for what we're doing.
The area for evolution is having a more effi cient generator on
the truck, " said Healy. " We plan to have a fuel-agnostic generator
and then a fuel-cell generator that runs on hydrogen, over
time. With each one of those steps, we can move to more and
more effi cient power generation, with the ultimate goal of being
more effi cient than a power plant.
" We're tackling all the problems as they come in and solving
them. But as every engineer appreciates, if it were easy, everyone
would be doing it. "
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