Model-Based Fault Tolerant Control for the Thermal Management of PEMFC Systems

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are considered as one of the most promising power sources for transportation in the near future. Proper and robust thermal management is a key issue in fuel cell applications. This paper mainly studies the sensor fault detection and isolation (FDI) and fault tolerant control (FTC) for the thermal management of PEMFC systems. The thermal model of fuel cell is established and analyzed by structure analysis, and the residual generator of sensor faults are designed by Dulmage-Mendelsohn decomposition to rearrange the biadjacency matrix of the thermal model. A sliding-mode-based active FTC (AFTC) strategy is proposed for the thermal management of fuel cell systems. The effectivenesses of the proposed FDI method and AFTC strategy are verified on a fuel cell test bench. The experimental results show that the temperature of the PEMFC stack can be maintained at the reference value with high accuracy even when sensor fails.