Diagnostic & health management of fuel cell systems: Issues and solutions

Continuous depletion of the crude oil and gradual increase in the oil price have emphasized the need of a suitable alternative to our century-old oil-based economy. A clean and efficient power supply device based on a renewable energy source has to be available to face this issue. Among the different technological alternatives, fuel cell power generation becomes a more and more interesting and promising solution for both automotive industry and stationary power plants. However, many technological hurdles have still to be overcome before seeing the development of industrial and competitive products in these fields. Among them, one of the major issues to be solved is their insufficient reliability and durability for stationary and transport applications. To reach this aim, efficient diagnostic and state-of-health estimation methodologies should be available, able also to operate real-time and with limited number of additional physical sensors. This paper describes the state-of-the-art and the motivations regarding these research issues. It presents also selected recent developments and experimentations in this area. (C) 2016 International Federation of Automatic Control. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.