Oxygen excess ratio control for proton exchange membrane fuel cell using model reference adaptive control

Optimized robust oxygen excess ratio (OER) control for proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) is now a critical issue for improving their economic efficiency and performance. In general, it is very difficult to control the OER due to modeling errors, parameter uncertainties, and disturbances. To address these issues, we propose a control system based on model reference adaptive control (MRAC) various difficulties inherent air supply systems. We utilize an adaptive law to address uncertainties implementation of the MRAC and nominal feedback controllers on a nonlinear model of fuel cell system is presented for illustration of the proposed system's robustness with various operating conditions. In addition, the control performance of MRAC is compared with nominal feedback control. The results show that the presented MRAC strategy performs better than the nominal feedback control method with less wear and less control effort on the compressor. The proposed MRAC algorithm can increase the compressor efficiency by using the adaptive law even with uncertainties.