A Hybrid Method for Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell Stack

Proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is a clean and efficient alternative technology for transport applications. The degradation analysis of the PEFMC stack plays a vital role in electric vehicles. We propose a hybrid method based on a deep neural network model, which uses the Monte Carlo dropout approach called MC-DNN and a sparse autoencoder model to analyze the power degradation trend of the PEMFC stack. The sparse autoencoder can map high-dimensional data space to low-dimensional latent space and significantly reduce noise data. Under static and dynamic operating conditions, using two experimental PEMFC stack datasets the predictive performance of our proposed model is compared with some published models. The results show that the MC-DNN model is better than other models. Regarding the remaining useful life (RUL) prediction, the proposed model can obtain more accurate results under different training lengths, and the relative error between 0.19% and 1.82%. In addition, the prediction interval of the predicted RUL is derived by using the MC dropout approach.