In this paper, direct numerical simulation (DNS) is performed to study coupled heat and mass-transfer problems in fluid-particle systems. On the particles, an exothermic surface reaction takes place. The heat and mass transport is coupled through the particle temperature, which offers a dynamic boundary condition for the thermal energy equation of the fluid phase. Following the case of the unsteady mass and heat diffusion in a large pool of static fluid, we consider a stationary spherical particle under forced convection. In both cases, the particle temperatures obtained from DNS show excellent agreement with established solutions. After that, we investigate the three-bead reactor, and finally a dense particle array composed of hundreds of particles distributed in a random fashion is studied. The concentration and temperature profiles are compared with a one-dimensional heterogeneous reactor model, and the heterogeneity inside the array is discussed.