PEM Fuel Cell System Model Predictive Control and real-time operation on a power emulator

Fuel Cell Systems (FCS) seem to be among the most reliable devices to produce clean energy, although they still suffer for many problems, mostly related to the fragility of the Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM). Particularly, this paper focuses on the oxygen starvation, that leads both a decrease of the FCS performance and a shortening in the FCS lifetime. The purpose is to use the Model Predictive Control (MPC) and its capacity of accounting for linear constraints for managing the air system without risking to damage the fuel cell. Two control inputs and no static feed-forward actions have been used. Results show that the MPC is able to avoid the oxygen starvation, even with a sudden increase of load current. Results obtained in previous works are confirmed with a FCS emulator and show the usefulness of the Model Predictive Control applied to the FCS.