Fault Diagnosis and Fault‐Tolerant Control Method for a Multistack Fuel Cell Thermal Management Subsystem

Abstract

Multistack fuel cell systems (MFCS) are promising developments of fuel cell technology. For MFCS, faults affect durability and stability, and appropriate fault diagnosis methods and control strategies need to be proposed for different multistack structures. Herein, the integrated MFCS thermal management subsystem (TMS), which is based on the optimized split‐stack approach, is first studied, and its possible sensor and actuator faults are analyzed. The sensor fault signal is corrected based on the unscented Kalman filter (UKF), the controller design under the hardware in the loop platform is carried out, and an active fault‐tolerant control (FTC) strategy based on sliding mode control is deployed for the TMS to enable it to recover its performance quickly and effectively in case of faults. The results show that the estimated values are closer to the true values after using the UKF on the sensor signals, avoiding the impact of sensor faults on the system performance. Under New European Driving Cycle dynamic conditions, the FTC controller also exhibits better control compared to the conventional proportional–integral controller, with smaller maximum overshoot and shorter system recovery and stabilization time in the event of a TMS fault, mitigating the impact of system fault on performance.