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In the paper we construct the model of phase change. Process of hydriding / dehydriding is taken as an example. A single powder particle is considered under the assumption about its symmetry. A ball, a cylinder, and a flat plate are examples of such symmetrical shapes. The model desribes both the "shrinking core"(when the skin of the new phase appears on the surface of the particle) and the "nucleation and growth"(when the skin does not appear till complete vanishing of the old phase) scenarios. The model is the non-classical boundary-value problem with the free boundary and nonlinear Neumann boundary condition. The symmetry assumptions allow to reduce the problem to the single spatial variable. The model was tested on the series of experimental data. We show that the particle shape’s influence on the kinetics is insignificant. We also show that a set of particles of different shapes with size distribution can be approxomated by the single particle of the "average" size and of a simple shape; this justifies using single particle approximation and simple shapes in mathematical models.

Metal hydrides are an interesting class of chemical compounds that can reversibly bind a large amount of hydrogen and are, therefore, of interest for energy applications. Understanding the factors affecting the kinetics of hydride formation and decomposition is especially important. Features of the material, experimental setup and conditions affect the mathematical description of the processes, which can undergo significant changes during the processing of experimental data. The article proposes a general approach to numerical modeling of the formation and decomposition of metal hydrides and solving inverse problems of estimating material parameters from measurement data. The models are divided into two classes: diffusive ones, that take into account the gradient of hydrogen concentration in the metal lattice, and models with fast diffusion. The former are more complex and take the form of non-classical boundary value problems of parabolic type. A rather general approach to the grid solution of such problems is described. The second ones are solved relatively simply, but can change greatly when model assumptions change. Our experience in processing experimental data shows that a flexible software tool is needed; a tool that allows, on the one hand, building models from standard blocks, freely changing them if necessary, and, on the other hand, avoiding the implementation of routine algorithms. It also should be adapted for high-performance systems of different paradigms. These conditions are satisfied by the HIMICOS library presented in the paper, which has been tested on a large number of experimental data. It allows simulating the kinetics of formation and decomposition of metal hydrides, as well as related tasks, at three levels of abstraction. At the low level, the user defines the interface procedures, such as calculating the time layer based on the previous layer or the entire history, calculating the observed value and the independent variable from the task variables, comparing the curve with the reference. Special algorithms can be used for solving quite general parabolic-type boundary value problems with free boundaries and with various quasilinear (i.e., linear with respect to the derivative only) boundary conditions, as well as calculating the distance between the curves in different metric spaces and with different normalization. This is the middle level of abstraction. At the high level, it is enough to choose a ready tested model for a particular material and modify it in relation to the experimental conditions.