Design and Implementation of a Preemptive Disturbance Rejection Controller for PEM Fuel Cell Air-feed System Subject to Load Changes

TLDR: In this article, a robust regulatory controller (termed as Robustness Tracking Disturbance Overall Aggressiveness (RTDA) controller) is developed to control oxygen excess ratio and compared with widely accepted schemes namely Proportional Integral Derivative (PID), Model Predictive Control (MPC) in all the control schemes, the control objectives aim to maintain the desire oxygen excess ratios while keeping the compressor voltage at its nominal working point under input and output operational constraints.

Abstract: The paper focuses on the control of air feed system on the PEM fuel cell subject to load changes For this purpose, a robust regulatory controller (termed as Robustness Tracking Disturbance Overall Aggressiveness (RTDA) controller) is developed to control oxygen excess ratio and compared with widely accepted schemes namely Proportional Integral Derivative (PID), Model Predictive Control (MPC) In all the control schemes, the control objectives aim to maintain the desire oxygen excess ratio while keeping the compressor voltage at its nominal working point under input and output operational constraints The two different scenarios: (1) Robustness Output tracking and (2) Disturbance rejection for each configuration are compared using computational time and performance indicators like Integral Square Error (IS E) The novel contribution of this work is the comparison of the performance of the schemes with respect to computational time Simulation results allow evaluating effectiveness of the RTDA controller and the performance of each configuration applied to Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) Fuel cell air feed system