A review on prognostics and health monitoring of proton exchange membrane fuel cell

Abstract

Fuel cell technology can be traced back to 1839 when British scientist Sir William Grove discovered that it was possible to generate electricity by the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen gases. However, fuel cell still cannot compete with internal combustion engines although they have many advantages including zero carbon emissions. Fossil fuels are cheaper and present very high volumetric energy densities compared with the hydrogen gas. Furthermore, hydrogen storage as a liquid is still a huge challenge. Another important disadvantage is the lifespan of the fuel cell because of their durability, reliability and maintainability.Prognostics is an emerging technology in sustainability of engineering systems through failure prevention, reliability assessment and remaining useful lifetime estimation. Prognostics and health monitoring can play a critical role in enhancing the durability, reliability and maintainability of the fuel cell system. This paper presents a review on the current state-of-the-art in prognostics and health monitoring of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC), aiming at identifying research and development opportunities in these fields. This paper also highlights the importance of incorporating prognostics and failure modes, mechanisms and effects analysis (FMMEA) in PEMFC to give them sustainable * Corresponding author Email address: (tsutharssan@iee.org) (Thamo Sutharssan)Preprint submitted to Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews November 14, 2016 competitive advantage when compared with other non-clean energy solutions.

A Comparative Study of Wavelet‐based Descriptors for Fault Diagnosis of Self‐Humidified Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells

“…Due to these advantages, they have been used in a range of applications in portable, stationary, transportation and aeronautical power generation . However, cost, durability and performance issues currently prevent their large‐scale commercialization , .…”

“…The key factors associated with PEM fuel cell health are flooding, drying and reactant starvation . Diagnosing these faults and implementing corrective action improves fuel cell performance and can increase the fuel cell's remaining useful life .…”

Improving the Performance of a Dual Kalman Filter for the Identification of PEM Fuel Cells in Impedance Spectroscopy Experiments

“…For this reason, diagnosis has a crucial role in order to extend the overall lifetime of a cell and improve its reliability. Many attempts have been made in literature to characterize faults [13], especially in the framework of water management [14], aimed at developing monitoring and prognostic methods [15,16].…”

Prognostics of a multistack PEMFC system with multiagent modeling

“…The approaches proposed in the literature for PHM of PEMFCs can be categorized into two classes: physics‐of‐failure based approaches and data‐driven approaches …”