DAYTON, Ohio — Most people are familiar with the burning feeling of hot sand on a sunny day at the beach.

However, what if that heat could be stored and optimized to one day power your home?

While Ohio isn’t known for its rays of sunshine, there are plenty of solar projects happening all across the Buckeye State. One Ohio research team is putting the spotlight on the potential of sand.

When Andrew Schrader started teaching mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Dayton in 2020, the Thermal Applications Lab was just a regular classroom.

Within just two years, the focus changed and it happened quickly as the demand in the industry continued to grow.

Schrader and a team of student researchers are working on three similar projects to harness the energy from really hot sand.

“Our hope is that by using simple sand thermal batteries we’re able to store energy within those batteries,” Schrader said.

The team is working to connect different energy resources into one central system. 

“That way it’s a lot easier to connect all of these diversified energy resources into our existing grid infrastructure,” he said.

Schrader said working with sand can be tricky.

It doesn’t behave like a solid or a liquid so it can be a challenge.

They can study the particles as they pour over hot pipes in a heat exchanger and in a custom-built solar simulator.  

“Basically these are college football stadium lamps, we can turn them on, they have special reflectors to take all of that light, concentrate it to a focal point about an inch and a half in diameter and you can get about 4 kilowatts of heat in that really focused region,” said Schrader.

Another way to study the sand is to have it move, circulate and get really hot.

For senior mechanical engineering major Jacob Brenner, this type of project fuels his future goals. 

“I’m thinking of working in renewable energy and incorporating that into electrical grid,” Brenner said.

By working on a small scale, Brenner and other students have hands-on access to big concepts, making them stand out when entering the workforce. 

“These sorts of projects interest me to see how renewable energy can actually be useful. I want to not view it as an idealistic version. I want to see how realistically we can incorporate it and how much we can incorporate it,” Brenner said.

For Schrader, it doesn’t stop with the sand. 

“In Ohio, the development of these types of technologies really opens the door for Supercritical CO2 power cycles,” he said.

Think small-scale, efficient power plants that use highly pressurized carbon dioxide of CO2 gas instead of air or steam.

Supercritical CO2 power cycles can be used in solar power, nuclear power, waste heat and many other resources.

“Ohio is set up to have the manufacturing expertise to make a major difference in that industry as it grows. So these types of research projects, these types of industrial partners are essentially going to potentially lead the future in Supercritical CO2 in Ohio,” said Schrader.

To help make the projects come to fruition, the team at UD is working with Brayton Energy, Sandia National Laboratories, and King Said University in Saudi Arabia.

The projects total $2 million and are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office.