Abstract: In the metal hydride compression cycle, the heat and mass transfer performance of the reactor has great impact on the system efficiency. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method was used to simulate the performance of heat and mass transfer on a new reactor bed with segmental baffle plate. The simulation on the reactor bed with different numbers of baffles and research on the unsteady state of the bed under a particular baffle number were carried on. As a result, the flow performance of reactor increases and heat transfer properties of reactor change less with the baffle number. Hence, the baffle of spiralplate type is indicated to optimize the above reactor. The simulation process proves that the new type reactor shows better heat and mass transfer performances than the reactor with segmental baffles.

Key words: metal hydrides, reaction bed, segmental plate, spiral plate, computational fluid dynamics