Development of an Aging Estimation Tool for a PEM Fuel Cell Submitted to a Mission Profile

Abstract

AbstractThe purpose of the presented work is to propose an inventive approach to estimate the aging of a fuel cell submitted to a mission profile. A mission profile can be decomposed in quasi‐static and dynamic sub‐missions. The proposed approach is based on the superposition principle considering that the cell voltage degradation, due to the application of the mission profile, can be determined using the cell voltage degradations experimentally evaluated for all the sub‐missions. In our case, four aging campaigns have been performed: an aging campaign for an aeronautical mission profile and three campaigns for quasi‐static sub‐missions. Each aging campaign consists in around 900 h of profile regularly interrupted to perform characterization phases. The cell voltage degradation attributed to a given solicitation can be estimated using polarization curves carried out during the regular characterization phases, and/or using instantaneous “voltage versus time” curves obtained during the ageing phases. In this paper, results of these campaigns are used to investigate concretely the proposed approach and several examples of application are presented. In all these examples, the results show a good agreement between the experimental cell voltage degradation and the estimated one using superposition principle, attesting of the potential of the proposed approach.