Constrained explicit predictive control strategies for PEM fuel cell systems

This paper presents the development of an explicit predictive control strategy for a stand-alone PEM (polymer electrolyte membrane) fuel cell. This fuel cell can be considered as a good benchmark since it is representative of the state of the art of PEM technology and is used by many research groups. The experiments are performed on a detailed nonlinear simulator of a fuel cell which has been validated experimentally. In order to achieve real-time implementation of the control strategy, the predictive control algorithm must be computed in a explicit way because of the sampling time of this system, which is in the order of milliseconds. The work shows the development and simulation results of the constrained explicit predictive controller that reduces the computational effort needed.