Near-Optimal Control of Net Output Power for PEMFC System

The interior of a fuel cell is a complex chemical reaction process. How to design an algorithm to achieve energy optimization is a challenging problem. Due to the nonlinearity of the system, it is usually difficult to obtain the real-time global optimal control strategy directly. In this paper, a near-optimal controller is proposed for a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) air supply system. The control goal is to maximize net output power of the PEMFC system by tracking a desired optimal oxygen excessive ratio. The tracking problem is formulated as a receding-horizon optimal control problem and a predictive timescale approximation technique is adopted to solve the optimal control law and effectively reduces the computational complexity especially with nonlinear systems like PEMFC. The simulation of dynamic excess oxygen ratio adjustment and various comparison with other control methods show the rapidity, high accuracy and fine capacity of resisting disturbance of the proposed method.