Control of oxygen excess ratio in a PEM fuel cell system using high-order sliding-mode controller and observer

The main objective of this manuscript is to design a high-order sliding-mode observer to provide finite time estimation of unmeasurable states (x 4: oxygen mass, x 5: nitrogen mass) together with the oxygen excess ratio (ratio of the input oxygen flow to the reacted oxygen flow in the cathode). This is done by applying second-order sliding modes through either super twisting or suboptimal controllers to control the proton exchange membrane fuel cell’s breathing. The estimated oxygen excess ratio is controlled in a closed-loop system using 2 distinct sliding-mode approaches: a cascaded super twisting controller and a single-loop suboptimal structure. Simulation results are presented to make a quantitative comparison between the cascade and the single-loop configuration. The results verify that the cascade provides accurate reference tracking while the single-loop presents faster convergence.