Bio-inspired volute disk for performance enhancement of metal hydride reactor coupled with nanoparticles enhanced phase change material

Abstract

Metal hydride is widely recognized as the efficiently method to storage H₂ due to its saving energy, safety, low cost and high H₂ storage capacity. However, heat transfer has always been the key limiting factor in the application of metal hydride H₂ storage reactors. A novel bionic volute disk reactor was proposed to effectively enhance heat transfer performance and accordingly accelerate H₂ storage efficiency. Additionally, the excellent stable scalability characteristics of volute structure can satisfy the diverse requirements for H₂ storage capacity in various application scenarios. Meanwhile, phase change material and nanoparticles were introduced to considerably improve heat transfer and H₂ storage efficiency at minimizing heat management during application. The reaction performances were investigated and optimized using 3D models, and the results illustrated that bionic volute disk reactor can improve hydrogenation efficiency by 40 % and dehydrogenation efficiency by 27 % compared to traditional planar spiral disk reactor. Meanwhile, the structural parameter investigations indicated that bionic volute disk reactor could achieve optimal performance with spiral turns of 3.5, tube diameter of 8 mm and spiral end radius of 40 mm. Moreover, the quality sensitivity analysis revealed the exceptionally stable scalability of bionic volute disk reactor can be achieved by adjusting tube length and layer count without compromising reaction performance. Furthermore, adding 20 % nanoparticles can increase the heat transfer rate by 19 % during absorption and 21 % during desorption, demonstrating an improvement in heat transfer characteristics and an enhancement of rapid response performance.