How many grains of sand are in one square inch? - Answers

It depends on the kind of sand you're talking about.There are five different types of sand, ranging from very fine to very course. Let's take the middle type of sand, which is medium sand.A grain of medium sand is between 1/50 of an inch and 1/100 of an inch. If you take the middle number between that range (~1/67), then we can estimate that a square inch of sand would have approximately 4500 grains of sand (67 squared is 4,489). This assumes a completely flat layer of sand one grain deep.A cubic inch of such sand would have just over 300,000 grains of sand.Obviously this number will vary based on the type of sand you're working with and can only be used for estimation purposes.IMPROVEMENT:Hmmm, first of all, the "middle number" would seem to be 1/75, not 1/67. Let's take 1/75.Second, the packing could be much denser than what the computation above seems to assume. With a denser packing of the grains of sand, a computation shows a shade less than 600,000 grains of 1/75" sand in a cubic inch.