Condition Monitoring and Fault Diagnosis of PEMFC Systems

This paper presents the development of an on-line condition monitoring system and a fault diagnosis approach for PEMFCs based on the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy measurement. More specifically, a condition monitoring system for PEMFCs is developed by using the stack impedance at a certain frequency for fault detection, which will provide the health condition of the PEMFC systems. On the basis of the state of health from the condition monitoring system, an EIS-based fault diagnosis approach is proposed for the stack by using the fuzzy logic. The effectivenesses of the proposed condition monitoring system and the fault diagnosis approach are demonstrated through a PEMFC test bench. The experimental results show that the proposed condition monitoring and fault diagnosis system can detect the PEMFC condition on-line and achieve accurate fault diagnosis results.