Time delay thermal control of a compact proton exchange membrane fuel cell against disturbances and noisy measurements

Accurate thermal control is challenging for a compact (like open-cathode type) proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) due to the increased coupling degree between air supply and cooling. Considering a large range of temperature variation occurring in the compact PEMFC under varied current disturbances, a time delay control (TDC) is developed to implement the thermal management in this article. The TDC is capable of eliminating unexpected disturbances by combining the time-delay information of input airflow and varied stack current, as well as the output temperature with the slow-dynamic characteristics of PEMFC thermal behavior. The liquid water saturation is introduced to interact the activation overpotential with heat and internal water changes. In particular, the observer of temperature and its derivative interfaced with TDC can co-enhance the noise variances rejection based on the thermal model with liquid water estimation. Simulation and experiment results demonstrate that the proposed TDC with observer (TDCO) is superior compared with the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) in terms of temperature tracking accuracy and robustness to noise. In the equivalent driving cycle test, the RMSE of TDCO can be reduced by 20.16% and 44.32% compared with normal TDC using numerical differentiations and ADRC under the white Gaussian noise.