PEM Fuel Cells Control by means of the Perturb and Observe Technique

In this paper the use of an adaptive technique aimed at controlling a polymeric electrolyte membrane fuel cell is introduced. It is demonstrated that a hill climbing-based method acting on the compressor speed and/or the backpressure valve opening is able to improve the performance of the fuel cell system with respect to those ones obtained by means of classical feed forward control approaches. Moreover, the proposed technique is able to ensure better performances even if well known aging mechanisms deteriorate cell efficiency. Numerical results based on experimentally derived models confirm the potential of the proposed control method and its intrinsic reliability