Uncertainty analysis of transfer function of proton exchange membrane fuel cell and design of PI/PID controller for supply manifold pressure control

Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell is one of the possible green solutions for energy generation. The response of the fuel cell system depends on the air and hydrogen feed, flow and heat/ water management. The main control task is to maintain the supply manifold pressure at the cathode side of PEMFC. In this article, an approximation of First Order plus Time Delay (FOPTD) model is obtained from the PEMFC dynamic model by process reaction curve method. The analysis of uncertainty for the FOPTD model was carried out. From the FOPTD model, a simple PID controller was designed and compared with other techniques like: ZN-PI, Skogestad - Internal Model Control (SIMC)-PI, Improved SIMC-PID and Smith Predictor. Also, MPC and decoupler design were implemented. The simulation results are obtained using MATLAB (R) which shows that the response of supply manifold pressure is well controlled. The gain and phase margins were found out from the Bode plots of open loop transfer function and closed loop transfer functions for stability analysis.