Event-triggered dynamic prescribed performance control for oxygen stoichiometry and stack temperature in PEM fuel cell systems with actuators faults

Abstract

Oxygen stoichiometry (OS) and stack temperature (ST) significantly affect the output performance and durability of proton exchange membrane fuel cells. This paper investigates the prescribed performance tracking control strategy of OS and ST under external disturbances, modeling errors, actuators faults and limited communication resources. The total disturbances are compensated by a variable-bandwidth extended state observer to simplify the control design and enhance the system robustness. To tolerate excessive disturbances and relax the strict requirement on the initial conditions, a new event-triggered adaptive sliding mode controller that integrates modified dynamic performance constraints and nonsingular error transformation is developed to ensure the user-designed transient and steady-state performance constraints, while saving the communication costs and avoiding the chattering and jump in control signals. The numerical validation results under combined working scenarios indicate that the proposed controller always ensures the preset error constraints and possesses superior performance in tracking the optimal OS value 2 and the optimal ST value 353.15K than other three representative controllers, with the integral absolute errors of 0.732 for OS tracking and 12.94 for ST tracking; besides, it achieves satisfactory robustness to uncertain model parameters and relatively large initial tracking errors.