Model predictive control for MCFC stack operation temperature

Operation temperature of a molten carbonate fuel cell stack should be controlled within a special range in order to improve availability and performance of fuel cells. In this paper, a predictive control algorithm based on the Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model is developed for the temperature of a molten carbonate fuel cell stack. Based on the future outputs predicted by a Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model, a discrete optimization of the control action is carried out according to the principle of branch-and-bound method. The simulation results demonstrate that there is a potential to introduce the predictive control based Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model to the development of fuel cells.