Data-Driven Voltage Prognostic for Solid Oxide Fuel Cell System Based on Deep Learning

Abstract

A solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) is an innovative power generation system that is green, efficient, and promising for a wide range of applications. The prediction and evaluation of the operation state of a solid oxide fuel cell system is of great significance for the stable and long-term operation of the power generation system. Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) technology is widely used to perform preventive and predictive maintenance on equipment. Unlike prediction based on the SOFC mechanistic model, the combination of PHM and deep learning has shown wide application prospects. Therefore, this study first obtains an experimental dataset through short-term degradation experiments of a 1 kW SOFC system, and then proposes an encoder-decoder RNN-based SOFC state prediction model. Based on the experimental dataset, the model can accurately predict the voltage variation of the SOFC system. The prediction results of the four different prediction models developed are compared and analyzed, namely, long short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent unit (GRU), encoder–decoder LSTM, and encoder–decoder GRU. The results show that for the SOFC test set, the mean square error of encoder–decoder LSTM and encoder–decoder GRU are 0.015121 and 0.014966, respectively, whereas the corresponding error results of LSTM and GRU are 0.017050 and 0.017456, respectively. The encoder–decoder RNN model displays high prediction precision, which proves that it can improve the accuracy of prediction, which is expected to be combined with control strategies and further help the implementation of PHM in fuel cells.