From vodka to hydrogen: exploring LiquidPiston’s revolutionary X-Engine
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Welcome to today's episode of Lexicon. I'm Christopher McFadden, contributing writer for Interesting Engineering. Today we sit down with Alec Czajkulnik, co-founder and CEO of Liquid Piston, to explore how revolutionary engine designs reshape power generation. From military-grade innovations to multi-fuel versatility, Alec shares insights into solving real-world challenges with Liquid Piston's cutting-edge X-Engine,

So join us as we dive into the future of energy, exploring how compact, efficient engines could transform industries and redefine what's possible in power technology. Before getting into today's episode, here's something to elevate your 2025.

Level up your knowledge with IE Plus Subscribe today to access exclusive premium articles enriched with expert insights and enjoy members-only technical newsletters designed to keep you ahead in technology and science. Subscribe now. Now let's continue with today's episode. Alec, thanks for joining us. How are you today? Doing very well. Thanks for having me. Our pleasure. For our audience's benefit, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, please?

Yeah, sure. I'm Alex Skolnick. I'm the co-founder and CEO here at Liquid Piston. My father, Nick, and I, we started the company almost 20 years ago, actually, around 2003. So my father's a physicist by background. I have a background in robotics, a PhD from MIT in artificial intelligence.

So we really just kind of came at the challenge of engines from a perspective of physics and optimization, just asking really basic questions like what can we do to improve the engine? Excellent. I was going to say an eclectic mix, but there's a lot of overlap between engineering and physics. So

So building on that then, so what inspired you to revisit and innovate on the Winkle engine design? And how did your background and your father's involvement shape the X-Engine? Yeah, so again, my dad's a physicist. He's always kind of been interested in thinking about

thermodynamics and power and energy solutions. He has a very kind of interesting career, but he ended up doing innovation consulting, focusing in a field called TRIZ. It's a Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. So it's a methodology to help solve problems and innovate.

And he ended up being a consultant in energy systems. So he has patents in supercapacitors and fuel cells and batteries, a whole bunch of energy-related technologies. But he always kept coming back to the engine. If you look at your car engine as an example, it only converts about 15% to 17% of the energy and fuel into useful mechanical work.

And from a physics perspective, that always just kind of bothered him. Like, why are we leaving so much on the table? Physics suggests that we can do better. So I was starting a PhD program at MIT. I started just kind of helping him out. We ended up participating in a business plan challenge at MIT. And one thing kind of led to another.

By the time I finished my degree there, the company was rocking and rolling. And why a rotary? I guess a short answer to that, we really started with the thermodynamics of engines, how engines operate, how they really convert the chemical energy of fuel into work, and

With rotary engines, we find a lot more flexibility. There's a lot of geometric tricks we can play. Part of the TRIZ methodology is to keep things really, really simple, have very few parts, but we also are trying to embody this new type of thermodynamic cycle that's more efficient inherently.

And we, we discovered that rotary engines kind of have a lot of versatility that we can use to, you know, try to figure out how to do it. Um, so the X engine was a journey. Um, you know, the, the company started with an idea of a liquid piston design, um,

And think of almost a regular piston except replace the metal piston with water. And, you know, very interesting concept. We could improve the thermodynamics of an engine. It was purely theoretical at that stage. Everybody thought we were crazy.

you know, it turns out that, that, um, it's actually in, in use today as a, uh, a pump for fish, for fish processing. It's called a free pump. They would combust over, over fluid and that combustion pressure would, you know, it's, it's the most gentle way actually to move, uh, fish around. Yeah. So, um, we, we were looking at how to embody this cycle and we,

we started developing different types of rotary engines. And another way to think of our company, we've learned several ways of not doing the cycle, so to speak. So the X engine itself is the fourth incarnation of our engine in pursuit of the cycle.

Especially today in trial and error, basically, isn't it, sir? Well, I would say more than trial and error. There's a tremendous amount of analysis and modeling and we do trial. Yeah, it takes a really dedicated team, a lot of people. My father and I are outsiders from the engine space, which...

is a dual-edged sword, right? We didn't know what's impossible. We didn't listen to all the people that told us that it's impossible. And I think that's what

what made it also work that we could go and try, try something totally new and different without being inhibited by, uh, the, the norms of the industry. Um, but we definitely surround ourselves by a lot of people that, that have, you know, decades of experience in, in engines and related fields. Um, so it takes a team.

was paid off um so again building on that can you explain the um so-called the high efficiency hybrid thermodynamic cycle and how it combines the advantages of diesel auto engines and atkinson thermodynamic cycles that is a mouthful it is a mouthful so yeah kind of as you allude to if we look at the different thermodynamic cycles out there they each kind of have their advantages so

So, you know, if I asked you what's more efficient, uh, a gasoline engine, like an auto cycle or a diesel cycle, what, what would you say? Well, I instantly would be diesel. I'm pretty wrong.

That's everybody's instinct. And if you look at, you know, a diesel car is more efficient, gets better miles per gallon than a gasoline car. So in practice, diesel engines are more efficient, but the thermodynamics of the cycles will suggest that it's the effect of the compression ratio, right? Diesel engines are able to achieve a higher compression ratio and the higher compression ratio drives

a better thermodynamic efficiency. If you were to compare a gasoline spark ignited engine and a diesel engine at the same compression ratio, the gasoline engine would actually win. So, you know, this is, this is just kind of like thermo one-on-one stuff, a constant volume combustion from, from,

from a gasoline engine is a better form of combustion. But if you have pre-mixed air and fuel, it limits your overall compression ratio. So the question that we have is how do we get constant volume combustion and a high compression ratio? These are two key elements. So we want to kind of borrow the combustion from a gasoline engine with a compression of a diesel engine.

And then the last piece is engines have a lot of energy left over in their exhaust. If you've ever heard a car that has a leak in the muffler, it's really noisy. You're hearing that energy, right? Typically more than a third of the chemical energy and fuel is lost out the exhaust, just literally just pressure and heat that comes out the exhaust.

So thermodynamically, we want to at least capture all of that pressure and keep expanding it and converting it into useful work. So that is a overexpansion part of the cycle. So those are the three key pieces of the cycle. We want to have a high compression like a diesel, constant volume combustion, and overexpansion.

And the constant volume piece, you know, there's kind of two ways to do that. One is by having a very rapid combustion process. You can essentially try to have a controlled explosion of the fuel. And that's, if you've heard of HCCI, homogenous charge compression ignition, that's been kind of the holy grail of engine research for us.

you know, the last couple of decades now. Billions of dollars are getting poured into this. They're trying to have controlled explosions, and that's a very challenging thing, as you can imagine. It becomes a big controls problem, and it's really hard on the engine, especially at higher loads. The other approach is, hey, let's give the engine more time that it needs to actually complete the air mixing and combustion process.

So that's what we're trying to do. And again, that's kind of where the rotary comes in. You know, a piston engine, you can't stop the motion. In a rotary engine, if you look at how the X engine operates, you'll see that at the maximum compression point, what we call top dead center, the rotor is still spinning, but the volume is not changing. So this just kind of gives you a little bit more time to get more complete combustion.

So that's kind of how we combine these things. Excellent. So it's kind of the best of both worlds, isn't it? Yeah, it's really cherry picking, right? So we didn't invent any one stroke, but we're borrowing features from all these different cycles that have been done

independently in the past and we're combining them into one kind of super cycle. So fantastic. So obviously the Wankel engine was an inspiration. It's not the same, but it's a massive inspiration for this. So the, the Wankel engine is, uh, we characterize it as a rotary engine that operates on the traditional four stroke, you know, spark ignited cycle. So we, uh,

We're not developing a rotary engine for the sake of developing a rotary engine, right? We got there because we think it's an easier pathway to implementing the cycle.

Um, and we, we looked at various different kinds of rotary engines, the X engine. I would actually kind of say it's more like a inside out Wankel rotary or inverted Wankel. So if you look at the Wankel engine, your, your listeners may be familiar with, you know, the Mazda rotary, the RX, uh, the RX series of sports cars. Um, there, there was a Saks, uh, you know, snowmobile engine and, and

the army today flies with the shadow UAV. It's the most widely deployed army UAV. It actually flies with the Wankel engine. So these engines have had some commercial success. If you look at how they work, they have a triangular piston, a triangular rotor inside of a peanut shaped housing. So it's a two lobed

peanut shaped housing. If you imagine kind of turning that quote unquote inside out. So we have a peanut shaped rotor that operates within a three lobed housing. Okay. So take everything you might know about the Wankel and turn it inside out. The Wankel has a long, skinny, moving combustion chamber.

That's really one of its major Achilles heels. If you look at how combustion develops inside of an engine, you get a kernel of the combustion and then you get kind of a ball of combustion and it grows more or less like a ball. And imagine trying to grow a ball of flame inside of a long, narrow corridor that's moving. And by the way, the corridor is cold compared

compared to your flame, it extinguishes the flame. So it's really hard to get complete, you know, thorough combustion inside the wine cull. So that's one major problem. The other problem is with

sealing and lubrication. And that causes emissions and durability challenges as well. So the Weinkl engine is great because it has very few parts. It has very low vibration, very well-balanced engine. It's very compact, very high power to weight. So it makes for a really nice, powerful, responsive engine. Really great for a sports car,

really great for UAV where it's all about power to weight, where you need to have that power available. It's great. But then if you care about efficiency, durability, emissions, all the things that we tend to actually care about when we drive a vehicle, for example, it suffers. So in turning that engine inside out,

We, first of all, instead of a long skinny moving combustion chamber, now we have a stationary combustion chamber in the housing. So instead of the combustion chamber being in the rotor, the chamber is now in the housing.

With that, we can drive a higher compression ratio. You just make the chamber smaller and it's suitable for direct injection of fuel by having fuel injectors. And guess what? Those are the two ingredients you need to run a diesel cycle. So the Wankel engine could never run a diesel cycle and the X engine inherently can run the diesel cycle. So that's a major difference. The other major difference is in the Wankel, they have these moving apex seals. Okay.

three points of the triangle they have seals that slide and they tend to bounce around and they're very difficult to lubricate right how do you get oil to these you know very very fast moving um seals so that's that's what creates the challenges with with that engine you can't really lubricate these very well you end up putting a lot of oil in uh you you mix the oil into the air

so that some of it can get to those seals, but really in reality, most of it, you're just burning all that oil. And that's what causes your emissions problems. While you're not properly lubricating your seals, you get durability problems. In our engine, the X engine, turning everything inside out, instead of moving tip seals in the rotor, we have tip seals that are stationary within the housing. Um,

So what that allows is direct lubrication of the seals and just kind of a more controlled sealing that where they're not bouncing around and moving at high speeds. And so we're, we're solving the key problems with sealing and lubrication and durability that's inherent to the rotary. So, you know, yes, we, we are a rotary engine for sure. Um, but if, when people ask me if we're, if we're a Winkle or aren't we, you know, similar to a Winkle,

I say, yes, yes, but it's actually quite the opposite. So we build on the natural power density of a rotary engine, very few components. There's just a rotor and a shaft. And yet we're able to optimize the thermodynamic cycle and address the key challenges of the rotary. Fair enough. I feel like I've insulted you. Apologies. It's all good. So with regards to fuel, is it multi-fuel, theoretically?

Yeah. So that's, that's one of the really cool things about, um, uh, about this engine. Um, first of all, it can inherently run on heavy fuels, fuels like kerosene, uh, jet fuel and diesel. And these are the fuels that basically power the DOD, right? Um, the, the DOD is the single largest consumer of oil on the planet. Um,

They're just a mega consumer. But also, they measure this in lives. It can take 100 gallons of fuel to push one gallon all the way to the front line. And not only is that expensive, that can be $400 or $500 per gallon at the front line.

but something like a quarter of our casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan were, were lost in protecting fuel convoys, you know, fuel and energy and power make a really good target. Unfortunately, we, we see this in the current conflicts in Ukraine, for example, right? Um, so what we really want to work towards is distributing our power and energy systems. We want to work towards, you know,

you know, small, lightweight, um, and, and efficient power solutions. And that's exactly what we can help do. And to your, to your question here, you know, yes, we can run on a variety of fuels, including all the heavy fuels. So we can really help support the DOD, but beyond that, we can run on gasoline. We can run, you know, we had a YouTuber come to our

facility, he ran the engine on vodka. So there's a video of this guy running around on a scooter with a vodka-powered X engine. But moving forward, we're looking forward to running the engine on hydrogen.

and we started to dabble on that. But if you think about hydrogen, you can generate hydrogen from water, right? You split water molecules, you get hydrogen and oxygen, and then you recombine them in an engine and it gives you heat back. So you can take electricity or solar energy

and generate hydrogen. And then you can use your, you know, basically the hydrogen is a storage mechanism of the energy. And then you, you release that energy using a, an engine like ours, um, that brings engines into a low carbon, you know, potentially a zero carbon world. So completely flips the entire narrative, uh, you know, and, and it really combines the, um,

with electrification. And this is another kind of question that I often get is how, how does this stuff relate to electrification? Like, isn't the world going electric and what's the role of engines in that world? Um, I think we're starting to see the pendulum on that discussion, you know, starting to swing back. Uh, so we we've been saying for a long time that

electrification is great it has its place really interestingly i'm not sure if you know some of your your listeners may may be aware of this but the first cars were all electric and um then people started to experiment with engines and engines didn't take off as a major um element in cars and actually the car didn't take off until we married electric starters with the engine

It was that marriage of electric and engine that finally allowed cars to displace the horse and carriage as the major form of transportation. So we kind of see this very interesting play between electric and engine. And people ask me what's going to happen there. I think that these are always going to be

joint technologies. I think we are offering a pathway to help electrification. So imagine a vehicle with a very small engine on it, and we're using it just for range extension. And especially if you go to hydrogen power, maybe you do the bulk of your driving with electric, with batteries. And the best feature of an electric car is regenerative braking.

You put all this work and energy into powering up your car and accelerating, and in a regular engine-based car, using brakes, you're throwing all that energy away as heat.

In an electric car, you're putting that energy back into the battery, at least a lot of it. So that is the number one advantage, in my opinion, if you ask me. That's the number one advantage of electrification. But beyond that, engines have a lot of advantages. Why do you need to carry a 1,200-pound battery everywhere you go? And oh, by the way, that battery has to get charged somewhere first.

If you look at the amount of energy that flows through a gas station, energy divided by time is power. A gas station, if you want to replace four gas stations on a really busy intersection, you would need to put up a small nuclear power plant.

So people just don't think about this, right? We don't have the infrastructure to produce all those electrons that are needed to go everywhere. And the question is, would you rather put up nuclear power reactors and other major power sources, or would you rather just kind of generate the electricity on the fly as you need it and take advantage of the best of both worlds, right? You can get regenerative braking while also generating

generating the electricity that you need right on board your vehicle. So that's our view. We think the world is going to be hybrid. We think hybrid offers the best of all solutions. At one extreme, you get all electric. At one extreme, you get all engine. And then there's an entire infinite range

spectrum in the middle there. So there's just a lot more opportunity for optimization when you look at things from a hybrid perspective. Absolutely. You've stolen all my follow-up questions there. And

Yeah, it doesn't have to be either or. It's going to be a combination of the two, really, especially with biofuels as well. You can move away from fossil fuels. It's such a useful way to have store energy as a liquid fuel. Yep. There's a lot of research going on in different types of fuels, and we're learning that we can generate fuels. We can take biowaste and

develop forms of diesel. In aviation, there's sustainable aviation fuels, SAF, and that's a big direction.

Um, and yeah, we're, we're just happy that, uh, the rotary engine is really kind of known to work well on a variety of different types of fuels. And we, we've definitely seen that and we, we've experimented with a variety of these fuels and, and demonstrated that it's, it's capable there. Great. And.

You've kind of answered this already, but you've got a 10 kilowatt generator prototype that you use for the US military. It's been described as a game changer. What specific challenges does it solve for the military? Yeah, so in the military, you know, everywhere that we go, they need more power and more energy on the move, right?

They're always deploying somewhere. The first thing they need to do when they go somewhere is set up a base, set up a control station for a UAB, power a radar, power a laser. They need power everywhere. The way that they get power today is with these mobile generators. If you look at a 10-kilowatt genset that the military uses, it's over 1,000 pounds.

So now that genset itself needs a trailer and that trailer needs a truck and that truck needs people to protect it. And you just kind of see that all of this cascades. So imagine the impact instead of a thousand pounds, if we can get this down to even 200 pounds, long-term we want to be less than that. But right now we're at 200 pounds.

that becomes man-portable. That's something that soldiers can lift and throw into a pickup truck if they want to. They can put it anywhere they want and just kind of go with it. So it is a game changer for them just with the logistical trail that's required right now to move power around, to have something that's extremely lightweight and nimble and

being able to give them the power that they need. That's super important. And we talked earlier about power and energy being a target, right? We have these convoys of fuel logistics and you take out the power for a squadron, you damage them, right? That's a critical target.

So anything we can do to help make it smaller, lighter, if you have these things that are five times smaller and lighter now, guess what? That makes it much easier to have two of them. With two of them, if one of them gets taken out, you still have the other capability. Right now, you still have available power. So all of that is a game changer.

And kind of looking the other way, okay, you're getting smaller. It's great. But what about if you upscaled the X engine? Would you need to, I suppose? I'm thinking of like sort of submarines or the ships. We have a bigger version of it. Would that have any benefits? Yeah. So the technology is scalable from down to five horsepower and up to about a thousand horsepower, I would say.

Going much beyond 1,000 horsepower, there are solutions like turbine engines that are extremely efficient in that range.

you know, subs, a lot of subs use nuclear today and you have to figure out how to get oxygen to your engine. There are some self-oxygenating fuels, so it is possible. It's just more of a niche case. But definitely scaling, you know, there's a lot of applications in that 5,000 to 1,000 horsepower space. And that's really exciting. So you mentioned the 10 kilowatt gen set.

Uh, we're also, we, we recently signed a $35 million contract with the air force and that's working on a larger engine and a larger gen set. Um, you know, so pretty soon we'll have a portfolio of engines where you can have, you know, multiples of about a hundred horsepower and that can serve truly a variety of applications. Fantastic. Um, so beyond the military, um,

What other industries could it transform? Yeah, so think about anywhere that we use engines today is a target for us. And anywhere that we use small turbines. Small turbines are really interesting. They have incredible power density, power to weight.

But their fuel economy is really quite dismal. So things like APUs, auxiliary power units for vehicles where you're not doing the main power for a system, but you're sort of powering everything else other than the primary propulsion.

Um, that's a big challenge. And, you know, I'll just give you an example. I was sitting on a, on a tarmac. This was my, my last flight before COVID shut down the world. And the pilot gets on the plane and he says, I have good news and bad news. The good news is we were going to have a shorter flight path into Boston. We're going to save, I forget what he said, an hour off the, off of flight time. The bad news is we're going to be too heavy to land in Boston.

So what the pilot did, he turned on the APU

for, I don't know, 15 minutes and he reduced the weight of the aircraft. This little auxiliary engine is so inefficient at burning fuel that they can use it to reduce the aircraft weight just by burning off a bunch of fuel. So, you know, that's an interesting space that I think we are going to play in in the future.

Um, so, you know, we're, we're starting with the military. It's a kind of a beachhead customer for us. They, every corner that we look at in the military, they, they are,

They really would benefit from more power in a smaller package that's more nimble. And they're willing to help pay for the development of the technology. So they've been a really great customer to work with. And that's kind of a win-win. They're helping us launch the company and we're helping solve a critical need for defense.

But the application here is much, much broader beyond that. So that's kind of the first domino for us. So how long would it be possible to potentially buy a car with this kind of engine in it? We're talking a decade, 20 years or more? A car is interesting. That might be one of the longer...

term ones. We've seen a lot of other engine companies. Unfortunately, most of them have not succeeded in the past. Interestingly, my father showed me a textbook a while ago, and it describes common rail fuel injection systems.

And I said, "This is great, dad. Why are you showing this to me? I kind of know this." And he said, "Look at the year of the book." And it was from 1972. Wow. So that technology wasn't adopted by the automotive industry until the '90s. And it was well-known and published in textbooks. It was already being taught in schools in the early '70s, 20 years ahead.

So, I mean, that just kind of shows the timeline that the automotive industry traditionally has moved at. I think there's been a lot of disruption in the automotive world, but it's still a fairly conservative market and industry on a whole. So we are kind of purposefully not targeting the automotive space yet as a first application.

You know, it's tempting because it's about a $300 billion market for automotive engines. But outside of automotive, there's about $100 billion in other engine markets. So we've just kind of made a conscious decision to start with more niche applications and then go into increasingly higher volume as time goes on.

So yes, it probably will be over a decade before you see us in a car, but I hope it's well within that to see us in other applications. Okay. Forgive my ignorance, but from a mechanical point of view, it's a lot simpler system than a traditional combustion engine, right? Diesel or gasoline. Yeah, so maintenance and maintenance costs and things like that will be

considerably lower. Yep. Once everything is fully, fully developed and productionized and in field and in service, that is 100% true. The engine has very few components, relatively speaking. There's a rotor and a shaft. There are bearings and some gears. Those are the major components inside the engine. And then you have the fuel system and other systems that kind of all engines would have.

But the core of the engine itself probably has about 10x, you know, an order of magnitude reduction in parts. But it's still, it's, engines are extremely nuanced devices.

And every little change that you make to them, you're impacting 10 other things. So it also takes quite a bit of time to like the in software, you have an idea, you know, you try something, you can you can understand if the idea has a good chance of working within a few weeks.

In the engine world, to design and prototype and test a new idea, really that takes probably at least about four to six months, I would say.

And so it's just a much longer cycle time to even try something new. And then there are literally thousands of variables, you know, thousands of ways to optimize and change the design in very nuanced ways that all kind of intertwine with each other.

So we're leveraging very heavily computational tools. We basically have supercomputers at our facility. We do a lot of software modeling. So we are trying millions of cases of different optimizations in software before we cut any real chips. But even so, it's still...

It still takes a surprising amount of time to develop an engine. So in the automotive world, it's about a seven-year cycle to design and develop and introduce a new engine. And that is a piston-based technology that's been around for 100 years. So we know everything about it. There's textbooks. They have 100 people that are just dedicated to each subsystem on that engine.

And it's a cookie cutter thing, right? You take the recipe that worked last time and you apply it to your next time. Doing something completely new where there are no textbooks, we're writing the book as we go. There's no empirical correlations. We don't know the exact heat transfer characteristics in our engine. We don't have all of the

learnings that are in the Piston Engine world. And yet we're trying to optimize the system and bring it up also to the level of something that's been around for over 100 years.

If we were trying to compete with the engine of the 1950s, it would be a very different story, but we have to compete with the engine of today in order to be successful in the market. That requires a level of maturity. Getting those last details right is a lot of work.

Yeah, that's fair enough. Are you finding, have you found any application for AI in helping you with the design, refining the design or?

Yeah. Yeah. We, we, we do use, as I said, supercomputers and software, and then, you know, the, the search space, the available, you know, optimization space for the engine is still so large that we need to, um, more, we need to be very careful of how we search the space. And as an example, you know, CFD computational fluid dynamics, um,

If we want to model the gas motion and the chemical properties and the fuel air mixing and the combustion, and we want to do all of this inside of the engine, that simulation takes over a week to run, right? So we can't just sit there and try a million things. We'll be here for a million weeks, right?

Um, so we, we have to be very selective in what we are trying, what we are exploring, whether it's in metal or, or in something like CFD. And one way of doing that is by applying AI tools to kind of help, help point you in the direction of where to, where to look. So we, we are leveraging the, uh, those technologies. Fantastic. Okay. Uh, I'll skip over quite a few questions cause you already answered them. Uh,

So with 82 patents issued or pending, how does Liquid Piston manage its intellectual property to stay competitive whilst fostering collaboration and or partnerships? Yeah. I mean, we have both a broad and deep patent portfolio. My father's background in TRIZ, he was also doing some work in something called patent busting.

He would be hired by companies and either they would try to figure out how to go around somebody else's patents or they would try to poke holes in their own portfolio and strengthen their portfolio so that nobody else could go around them. So we have a very kind of deep understanding of the patent world. We're also working with an exceptional patent attorney and firm, Bruce Sunstein.

He's kind of famous for patenting the Segway. So in terms of the patents, we have patents on the thermodynamic cycle.

This is an extremely fundamental patent. The next layer above that is something like the X engine. Imagine patenting a four-stroke piston engine. It's an extremely broad patent. And then the final layer is what we call pickets or a fence. It's all the little things that make the system work. How do you cool it? How do you seal it? How do you lubricate it? How do you make it

durable, et cetera. So it's a very carefully thought out patent portfolio. The patents are not cheap. They cost a lot of money to get and defend. And also I would say that patents are only a portion of

intellectual property of the company. Really, we are developing the tools, the know-how, the processes, all of that. There's a lot of stuff that's not patented that is kind of kept as

as knowledge inside of the company. And that is extremely valuable for us. So the way that we're trying to commercialize this technology and what kind of a business we're going to be, a lot of people don't know this, but when automotive companies come out with a new engine, they will typically contract one of a handful of companies, FEV, IAV, AVL, and Ricardo,

there's a handful of companies that really have very deep expertise in piston engine development and especially, you know, automotive engine development. And so Chrysler will, will contract one of these companies. They'll work together for a while and then, and then transition over to production under, under Chrysler. So we kind of want to be the AVL of the X engine, right? And,

It's our way of kind of being very efficient at getting the technology out into a variety of applications. There are also, there are a lot of companies out there that are really good at

selling, servicing, distributing engines and other systems. And as a startup, we don't have any of that capability, right? So either we would need to invest probably on the order of a billion dollars to tool up an engine production capability. If we're talking about high volume, something like automotive, that's what you would be looking at just to tool up a facility

for producing such engines. Or we can partner with somebody that already has that

And, you know, we become the innovation arm, the technology arm and, and the engineering and design arm of, of that company. So that the, the IP is extremely important for us, um, in, in that business model, right? We're ultimately, we're licensing the technology to, uh, to, uh, existing players. Excellent. Have you got any plans to go public?

You know, we've had a very interesting history in fundraising. So-

We have done the traditional venture capital route. And more recently, we have done what's called equity crowdfunding, which is sort of almost a form of going public. But basically, it's a way for private companies to raise money publicly. So we can announce a fundraise and

and then raise money. We actually have over 19,000 investors in the company. And we've raised over $50 million through these types of equity fundraisers. In terms of going public, there's

There's a few ways that companies will traditionally provide returns for shareholders. So the most common way, at least for a venture-backed company, would be through a M&A, through an acquisition. Perhaps if we are valuable to somebody like a Honda or a Lockheed Martin or somebody, we become their engine division at some point.

That is probably the most likely scenario, just how most venture companies would exit.

If we are insanely profitable and the licensing model is going swimmingly well, we can return dividends to shareholders. And the third approach is in going public. So if we do want to tool up, for example, and kind of raise larger amounts of money in order to kind of become a bigger business, that's an option that we can look at.

a lot of things have to go, you know, just, just right for that kind of, um, opportunity. The markets have to be just, just right. And the technology has to be at the right, at the right stage. So it's, it's possible. Um, you know, it's, but it's, it's not, um, it's not something that we're, we're counting on right now. It's fair enough. Fair enough. Just interested to see if anyone can invest in me basically easily a lot. Um,

So that brings us to the last question, really. So reflecting on Liquid Pistons' 15 years of progress, what are you most proud of and what excites you about the next phase in the company's development? Yeah, that's a really great question. I think I'm most proud of the team. I mean, it's really been an amazing team. It's not an easy thing by any stretch to develop a new engine. There are just so many things that we need to do

And we have a fraction of the resources of a large company that is, is doing this. So with a very small team, you know, we, we are taking on a monumental task here. So I'm immensely proud of that, um, team and, you know, we, we have, um, I think we're 45 people right now and we're, we're growing.

Um, so any engineers out there, we're also offering a, uh, a $5,000 bonus. If you refer somebody to us, I'll just kind of put that plug out there. Um, but, uh,

Yeah, just a great team that, you know, the number of things that we have to get across. And I can tell you every four months, I have a new set of problems. You know, people love to ask me, what's holding us back? What's our main problem? And I'm like, I can tell you what my main problem is today, but I can almost promise you that even in four months, it's going to be a different, quote unquote, main problem.

But you know what? Every single time the team has come at it and gotten through it and resolved whatever that block is. So that's what I'm most proud of. In terms of the next development phase, I mean, we've spent a lot of time and energy improving out the base technology. We are basically about to ship our first engines to the Army.

for their testing. We'll be shipping later this year our first gen sets to the army for their testing. So we're kind of at this inflection point right now where the technology is really getting a good foundation and now we need to cross into the next stage of getting stuff into production. So that's the next phase and that's right at the inflection point of where we are right now. Fantastic. Very best of luck with that. Yeah.

That's all my questions. Is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't touched on or mentioned? Anything simple? I think we covered a lot of ground here. I mean, ultimately, you know, we have a smaller, lighter, more efficient engine platform, really innovative approach to it and a

fantastic team. So, you know, we're always happy to connect with people that are interested in the technology and appreciate this opportunity here to chat with you. Absolutely. Our pleasure. With that, Ben, thank you for your time, Alec. That was genuinely very interesting. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you. Also, don't forget to subscribe to IE Plus for premium insights and exclusive content. Music