Health Indicators for PEMFC Systems Life Prediction Under Both Static and Dynamic Operating Conditions

Abstract

The durability and reliability are two main obstacles for the widespread commercialization deployment of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC). Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) could supervise the State of Health (SoH) and make the right action at the right time to extend the lifetime of PEMFC. In the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction, the Health Indicators (HIs) are able to reflect the degradation state and an efficient Health Indicator (HI) could make sure the prediction accuracy. In general, the voltage and power are the most commonly used HIs because they are easy to measure or calculate. Besides, the current and voltage sensors are convenient to be installed and the voltage and power are always supervised for the control purpose. Nevertheless, these two HIs are more suitable for static operating conditions and assume that their deviation is only influenced by the ageing phenomenon. In the dynamic or time-varying operating conditions, the voltage and power are synthetically influenced by the operating parameters and deterioration factors. So some novel HIs (e.g., virtual stack voltage, average resistance) should be used for the dynamic working conditions. Moreover, two HIs, i.e., polarization resistance and power loss, are proposed in this paper. Finally, the performances of different HIs are evaluated based on the experimental data.