Health Management for PEM Fuel Cells Based on an Active Fault Tolerant Control Strategy

Health management can effectively extend the service life of proton exchange membrane fuel cells and reduce the maintenance cost. This paper proposes a health management method for the proton exchange membrane fuel cells based on an active fault tolerant control method. With the advantages of low cost and high speed, a stack voltage model is developed for the condition monitoring. The fast electrochemical impedance spectroscopy measurement is performed when the condition monitoring module detects faults. Then, the distribution of relaxation time is used to extract the characteristics of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy for fault diagnosis. Thereafter, based on the diagnosis results, the performance recovery strategies are incorporated to cope with the faults. This paper adopts three typical fuel cell faults, namely flooding, membrane drying, and air starvation, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed health management. Experimental results show that the proposed health management can realize real-time health monitoring and rapid fault diagnosis, and achieve effective recovery of performance under faulty conditions, thereby significantly improving the reliability of the proton exchange membrane fuel cell system.