Static and dynamic modeling of a PEMFC for prognostics purpose

To face the global warming and the emission of greenhouse gases, Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) seems to be an adapted solution. However, this technology is not yet completely ready for large scale market. As one of the hurdles, the life duration of PEMFC remains too limited [1]. To overcome this obstacle, the Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) field seems to be interesting. Indeed, the main objective of PHM is the estimation of the time before the failure in order to make the good decisions at the right time for the system to ensure increased durability. The SAPPHIRE EU project aims at developing this field for PEMFC. In a first step, on the prognostics side, it is necessary to develop a way to reproduce the behavior of the stack. A physics based model seems to be an appropriate way for simulating the behavior. The model developed in this paper [3] [4] is based on an equivalent circuit approach that takes into account low frequencies evolutions through a quasi-static part and fast ones through a dynamic part. This model is developed and validated in order to study its suitability for prognostics purpose.