Design of the metal hydride reactors – A review on the key technical issues

The metal hydride reactors are widely used in many industrial applications, for example, hydrogen storage, heat pump, thermal compression, gas separation, etc. The performance of the reactor is greatly affected by its design, which deserves careful study. Given the complicated nature of the hydride formation/decomposition processes, a series of technical issues are involved in the design of metal hydride reactors, such as primary configuration, thermal management, hydrogen transfer and mechanistic strength. These issues should be well addressed to fulfil the requirement of specific application. In this paper, the representative achievements with regards to the design issues so far were reviewed in detail, and some comments were made accordingly. It was concluded that an optimized reactor design comes from integrated considerations of numerous factors, particularly requirements for the applications and characteristics of the metal hydride system. The analytic hierarchy process was recommended for use in the selection of the optimum reactor scheme.