A novel method for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell fault diagnosis using 2D data

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel approach for fault diagnosis of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) with two-dimension (2D) image data, and investigates its effectiveness of identifying faults at different PEMFCs in terms of discrimination capacity and robustness. In the analysis, one-dimension (1D) voltage data from single cell is converted to corresponding 2D image using signal-to-image conversion technique. Various features are then extracted from the 2D image data, and optimal features are determined using Fisher discriminant analysis (FDA). Test data from PEMFC at different faulty states, including flooding and dehydration states, is collected for the analysis, and the effectiveness of optimal features in discriminating various states is investigated using K-means clustering method. Moreover, diagnostic performance with 2D image data is compared to those using 1D voltage signals, such that its effectiveness can be better highlighted. Furthermore, with test data collected from two different single cells, robustness of proposed method can be illustrated.