Intelligent comprehensive control to prevent performance degradation of PEM fuel cell

Abstract

To prevent the performance degradation of proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC), this paper conducts research in intelligent comprehensive control of the operational parameters, such as the operating temperature, pressure, mass flows of hydrogen and air for the PEMFC stack, current density, the exhaust emission quantity of reactant gas, and humidity of the hydrogen and air/oxygen. An analysis is presented about the factors which affect the performance of PEMFC stack, including the influences of the leakage loss, and internal structures of the stack. An intelligent comprehensive control strategy is proposed and applied to a 300 W PEMFC system for an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) with backup PEMFC and battery power sources. The experimental results show that the performances of PEMFC have been improved comparing with the normal performance using the conventional PI control, and performance degradation can be prevented effectively.