Adaptive Parameter Identification of a Fuel Cell System for Health-Conscious Energy Management Applications

Since a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell (FC) has time-varying characteristics, its online characteristics estimation (voltage, power, internal resistance, etc.) is becoming a key step in designing an energy management strategy (EMS) for hybrid FC vehicles. In this respect, this paper proposes a new method based on Lyapunov adaptation law to estimate the linear and nonlinear parameters of a renowned PEMFC model in the literature. Unlike most of similar estimators, the suggested approach determines the maximum current, which is a nonlinear parameter, online while guaranteeing the system closed-loop stability. This parameter is normally assumed to be constant while it changes through time owing to degradation and operating conditions variation. This alteration makes the model imprecise while extracting some important characteristics, such as maximum power and polarization curve. Therefore, it needs to be regularly updated along with other parameters. To demonstrate the capability of the suggested method, a detailed comparison is provided with the well-known extended Kalman filter (EKF) as an attested nonlinear estimator. Moreover, to highlight the effectiveness of the nonlinearity consideration, a comparison with KF is performed where the nonlinear parameter is considered constant. The performed experiments on a 500-W PEMFC show that the proposed method can be over twice as accurate as EKF and KF concerning the estimation of maximum power and current while its runtime is nearly half of them.