Safety verification and adaptive model predictive control of the hybrid dynamics of a fuel cell system

The problem of safety verification of a fuel cell (FC) system is addressed in this paper. The aim of safety verification is to check whether the oxygen ratio can reach dangerous values or not. Assuming that the compressor voltage is controlled by means of a feedforward control, two algorithms for safety verification are formulated and applied to the PWA model of the FC. An improved behavior is obtained using an adaptive predictive controller to determine the voltage to be applied to the compressor. An admissible robust control invariant set for the PWA model of the system is computed. The control action of the predictive controller is obtained in such a way that the state is always included in the safe region provided by the admissible robust control invariant set. This guarantees that the proposed controller always provides safe evolutions of the system. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.