MAE Professor Richard Wirz and his research group had their sulfur thermal energy storage (TES) research featured in Advances in Engineering.
From the research summary:
Professor Richard Wirz at UCLA proposed a novel high-temperature thermal storage solution (SulfurTES) by using elemental sulfur as storage medium. With low cost for the storage and containment materials, high thermal stability from room temperature to above 1000°C, and high heat transfer rate at liquid stage, SulfurTES shows great potentials to be a competitive technology for the next-generation thermal storage in future commercial renewable power generation infrastructures. Based on the efforts by the UCLA researchers, including Prof. Wirz and his colleagues Dr. Kaiyuan Jin, Dr. Amey Barde, and Dr. Karthik Nithyanandam, configuration changes in the orientation of the sulfur-based thermal storage elements was found to significantly affect the heat transfer performance for the SulfurTES systems.
This research is based on Jin, K., Barde, A., Nithyanandam, K., & Wirz, R. (2019). Sulfur heat transfer behavior in vertically-oriented isochoric thermal energy storage systems. Applied Energy, 240, 870-881.