Prognostics of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells stack using an ensemble of constraints based connectionist networks

Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) is considered the most versatile among available fuel cell technologies, which qualify for diverse applications. However, the large-scale industrial deployment of PEMFC5 is limited due to their short life span and high exploitation costs. Therefore, ensuring fuel cell service for a long duration is of vital importance, which has led to Prognostics and Health Management of fuel cells. More precisely, prognostics of PEMFC is major area of focus nowadays, which aims at identifying degradation of PEMFC stack at early stages and estimating its Remaining Useful Life (RUL) for life cycle management. This paper presents a data-driven approach for prognostics of PEMFC stack using an ensemble of constraint based Summation Wavelet-Extreme Learning Machine (SW-ELM) models. This development aim at improving the robustness and applicability of prognostics of PEMFC for an online application, with limited learning data. The proposed approach is applied to real data from two different PEMFC stacks and compared with ensembles of well known connectionist algorithms. The results comparison on long-term prognostics of both PEMFC stacks validates our proposition. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.