Thermal conductivity measurements of metal hydride compacts developed for high-power reactors

Thermal conductivity measurements on porous metal hybride compacts were performed to supplement the limited existing data, These materials are proposed for reactors that are designed for heat-pump applications requiring high specific powers, Previous computational studies have shown that the effective thermal conductivity k(eff) is a crucial optimization parameter, If it is too low, the reactors themselves limit the system performance, It is sufficiently high, external thermal resistances dominate and overdesign of the materials is unnecessary and unavoidably increases parasitic thermal losses, In this study nine samples were tested using the comparative method and careful attention was paid to ascertaining and propagating all errors into the final data reported.