GOALI: Estimation and Control of Water in PEM Fuel Cells

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract Power generation from Fuel Cell (FC) systems involve interplay of various attributes from its chemical, fluid, mechanical, thermal, electrical, and electronic subsystems. This study concentrates on the process that describes the reactant and water dynamics in a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells. While computational fluid dynamic models have been gainfully used to represent this process and aid in the design of fuel cell systems, they are difficult to calibrate for large stacks and too complex for control design. Any model-based control scheme used for water management must adequately trade-off simplicity while still being able to predict the dynamic behavior of the vapor and liquid phase transport, and consequently electrode flooding. The goal of this project is to extract tractable models of the two-phase, reaction-diffusion, spatially distributed water dynamics for parameterization and model-based control of fuel cells. Discretization and model order reduction techniques will be employed to reveal the dominant processes and parameters. Analytic methods for the identifiably and parameter convergence problem will be supplemented with unique experimental methods. The results from this project will be used jointly with NIST to develop guidelines for parameterization and estimation of water in FCs. The models will be used in the last phase of the project for water management, namely, predicting, detecting, and avoiding flooding or de-hydration. Fuel cell systems promise to be an attractive alternative to traditional energy systems such as gas turbines and internal combustion engines, as they are cleaner and more fuelefficient. More importantly, they enable the goals of reduced dependence on foreign oil and ease the transition to a hydrogen based economy. However, before the successful commercialization of Fuel Cell technology in transportation and stationary power applications, a critical need for increasing the life-time and robustness of these systems has to be addressed. This project seeks to address this challenge by developing and implementing advanced control methodologies for these fuel cell systems.