Thermal Management and Voltage Stabilization in Air-Forced Open-Cathode Fuel Cells

Abstract

Temperature control is undoubtedly one of the important challenges in open-cathode fuel cell systems. Due to cost considerations, it is traditionally achieved by constant-speed operation of the fans. In this paper, a state feedback temperature controller, combined with a Kalman filter to mitigate the noisy temperature measurements is designed and implemented. The controller-filter set facilitates robust thermal management with respect to model uncertainties and measurement noise. The proposed temperature control not only manages to track the fuel cell temperature reference, it can also be used to stabilize the output voltage. Voltage regulation is of great importance for open-cathode fuel cells as it guarantees a predictable and fixed fuel cell output voltage for given current values in spite of internal and external disturbances. The controllers were implemented experimentally and the results show promising performances in regulating the reference temperature and voltage despite model uncertainties and disturbances.

Meeting Name

ASME 2015 Dynamic Systems and Control Conference, DSCC2015 (2015: Oct. 28-30, Columbus, OH)

Department(s)

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

Cathodes; Electrodes; Energy harvesting; Feedback; Fuel cells; Fuel storage; Human robot interaction; Intelligent robots; Intelligent systems; Robots; State feedback; Temperature control; Temperature measurement; Thermal variables control; Uncertainty analysis; Voltage regulators; Wind power; Constant-speed operations; External disturbances; Fuel cell temperature; Measurement Noise; Model uncertainties; Reference temperature; Temperature controllers; Voltage stabilization; Controllers

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

978-0-7918-5725-0

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2015 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Oct 2015

Link to Full Text

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