Efficiency improvement strategy of fuel cell system based on oxygen excess ratio and cathode pressure two-dimensional optimization

Abstract

Improving the commercial fuel cell system efficiency is critical to reducing hydrogen consumption and improving the operational economy. This paper studies the power consumption pattern of the air supply subsystem, the most power-consuming auxiliary components, aiming to improve the system’s efficiency. A method was proposed to get the extremum of the system net power by optimizing the oxygen excess ratio and cathode pressure. Mathematical models describing the fuel cell stack and air supply subsystem power characteristics were developed based on the mechanism analysis and estimation of unknown parameters. Then, a system net power model for energy efficiency optimization was developed. The operating conditions for optimal efficiency at a specific current density can be obtained by numerical calculation. To verify the method’s effectiveness, a series of experiments were conducted, and the results show that the proposed method can maximize system net power output at various current density conditions. Compared with the conventional oxygen excess rate based one-dimensional optimization, the two-dimensional method can improve system efficiency by 2.06%, offering a good application prospect.