Adaptive control strategy of fuel cell voltage stabilization for long-term operation

ABSTRACT

An adaptive control strategy for fuel cell stabilization is proposed to alleviate the coupling effects of power output variation and performance degradation in the whole service life. An improved semi-empirical model is firstly developed to describe and analyze the direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) performance under different operating conditions while considering degradations. Multi-objective optimizations are then utilized for the adaptive generation of control strategy to stabilize the voltage. Experiments are implemented to validate the effectiveness of the adaptive control strategy at different time periods during long-term operation. The results show that the improved semi-empirical model can provide a dynamic description of DMFC I-V relationships with the time. The adaptive control strategy developed from this model is effective for voltage stabilization that the deviation could be constrained in ±10% at different power outputs during long-term operation.

KEYWORDS:

• Direct methanol fuel cell
• long-term operation
• performance degradation
• voltage stabilization
• adaptive control strategy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51975196 & 52075159), the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province (2022JJ30019), Virtual Reality Key Application Technology Research (Revealed and Commanded) Project of Jiangxi Province (No. 20220173), the State Key Laboratory of Clean Energy Utilization (No. ZJUCEU2020010) and The open foundation of Guangxi Key Laboratory of Processing for Non-ferrous Metals and Featured Materials, Guangxi University (No. 2022GXYSOF24).