A new method is presented to couple the fluid flow in a fixed bed to the transport and reaction inside a catalyst particle, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The particle is modeled as solid, allowing no-slip surface flow boundary conditions to be used. Species transport inside the particle is represented by user-defined scalars, and the catalytic reactions arc represented by user-defined functions. The new method is validated using standard cases for which exact results are known. Previous work has used a porous representation of the catalyst particle, which results in inaccurate temperature and species profiles due to an artifact of convective flux across the particle fluid interface. This also gives incorrect values of the particle-to-fluid heat transfer coefficient, compared to standard correlations. Simulation results are presented for methane steam reforming using spherical particles in a wall segment, under tube inlet and midtube conditions, to illustrate the solid particle method.