Working conditions analysis and performance degradation estimation of fuel cell buses based on real road data

Nowadays, there are already more and more proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) buses demonstrated around the world. In order to improve the performance of automotive PEMFCs, it is necessary to understand the fuel cell working conditions and its degradation trend in real operation conditions. In this work, a study on statistical analysis of four hydrogen fuel cell buses is introduced. Fuel cell working conditions and energy management strategy of four fuel cell vehicles are extracted based on 550~870 hours fuel cell operating data, which mainly covers the rapid activation and linear decline stages of fuel cells. Long and short-term memory algorithm and linear regression algorithm are utilized in combination for performance degradation rate prediction. The relationship between fuel cell working conditions and degradation rates of four buses are analyzed. The results show that, load changing and start-stop operation are the two key operating conditions that accelerate the fuel cell aging. On the contrary, during activation period, frequent load changes are beneficial to increase fuel cell lifetime and slow down fuel cell degradation process. As a result, the lowest performance degradation rate is estimated as 12.13 μV/h, which is acceptable for vehicular applications. However, this result needs to be further checked with more operation data in the future.