Segmented Model-Based Hydrogen Delivery Control for PEM Fuel Cells: a Port-Hamiltonian Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a port-Hamiltonian based control method for managing pressure dynamics in PEM fuel cell fuel delivery systems, using segmentation to approximate PDEs with ODEs and ensuring stability through passivity and observer design.

Contribution

It develops a novel segmentation-based port-Hamiltonian control framework with an extended IDA-PBC and high-order sliding mode observer for pressure regulation in fuel cells.

Findings

Effective pressure control demonstrated in simulations.

Reduced modeling error through segmentation approach.

Stable output feedback control achieved with observer.

Abstract

This paper proposes an extended interconnection and damping assignment passivity-based control technique (IDA-PBC) to control the pressure dynamics in the fuel delivery subsystem (FDS) of proton exchange membrane fuel cells. The fuel cell stack is a distributed parameter model which can be modeled by partial differential equations PDEs). In this paper, the segmentation concept is used to approximate the PDEs model by ordinary differential equations (ODEs) model. Therefore, each segments are having multiple ODEs to obtain the lump-sum model of the segments. Subsequently, a generalized multi-input multi-output lumped parameters model is developed in port-Hamiltonian framework based on mass balance to minimize the modeling error. The modeling errors arises due to the difference between spatially distributed pressures in FDS segments, and also due to the difference between the actual stack pressure and the measured output pressure of the anode. The segments interconnection feasibilities are ensured by maintaining passivity of each segment. With consideration of re-circulation and bleeding of the anode in the modeling, an extended energy-shaping and output tracking IDA-PBC based state-feedback controller is proposed to control the spatially distributed pressure dynamics in the anode. Furthermore, a sliding mode observer of high order is designed to estimate the unmeasurable pressures in FDS with known disturbances. Performance recovery of output feedback control is accomplished with explicit stability analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed IDA-PBC approach is validated by the simulation results.