Improvement of Temperature and Humidity Control of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells

Abstract

Temperature and humidity are two important interconnected factors in the performance of PEMFCs (Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells). The fuel and oxidant humidity and stack temperature in a fuel cell were analyzed in this study. There are many factors that affect the temperature and humidity of the stack. We adopt the fuzzy control method of multi-input and multi-output to control the temperature and humidity of the stack. A model including a driver, vehicle, transmission motor, air feeding, electrical network, stack, hydrogen supply and cooling system was established to study the fuel cell performance. A fuzzy controller is proven to be better in improving the output power of fuel cells. The three control objectives are the fan speed control for regulating temperature, the solenoid valve on/off control of the bubble humidifier for humidity variation and the speed of the pump for regulating temperature difference. In addition, the results from the PID controller stack model and the fuzzy controller stack model are compared in this research. The fuel cell bench test has been built to validate the effectiveness of the proposed fuzzy control. The maximum temperature of the stack can be reduced by 5 °C with the fuzzy control in this paper, so the fuel cell output voltage (power) increases by an average of approximately 5.8%.

Thermal Performance Optimization of Multiple Circuits Cooling System for Fuel Cell Vehicle

“…Influence effect does not examine the interaction between factors, so it is better to choose L8 (2 7 ) orthogonal table. To examine the interaction, L12 (2 11 ) should be used. Eight combination schemes are determined in the test table.…”

“…The heat generated by the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) [9] mainly depends on the circulation of the coolant in the cooling system. Temperature is an important parameter affecting the performance of the fuel cell [10][11][12]. Temperature is also related to the efficiency [13].…”

Fast Model Predictive Control of PEM Fuel Cell System Using the L1 Norm

“…Recent works show that PEM output power quality can be improved using classical and fractional-order PID controllers [12]. An example of a fuzzy control method to control the temperature and humidity of the stack has been presented in [13]. It is also possible to use a fuzzy adaptive PI controller with an improved advanced genetic algorithm [14].…”

Optimization of Water & Heat Management System for Automobile PEMFCs with Fuzzy PID Control

“…PEMFCs are low-temperature fuel cells. When their electric piles work within the temperature interval of 60-80°C, the energy efficiency of PEMFCs can be as high as 40-60% [6]. When the working temperature of electric piles is too low, the internal impedance of electric piles will increase and, when this problem worsens, the internal part of electric piles may become frozen, which results in difficulties in starting up the electric piles.…”