Pressure Regulation in Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell using Direct Active Fuzzy Non-Linear Controller

Abstract

A Direct Active Fuzzy Nonlinear Controller (DAFNLC) has been designed to control the pressures of supplied reactants to both Cathode and Anode of a Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC). This controller also ensures that the pressure difference across the membrane is maintained within the prescribed limit in order to improve the life of PEMFC. A control oriented Multi input-Multi output model in the state space has been used for PEMFC. An integral controller in association with a state feedback is employed which is termed as Non-linear controller. A Fuzzy Logic component has been used to fix the gains of both integral and state feedback controller modes and thereby the controller is named as DAFNLC. It is a well-known fact that the irregular supply of reactants to both the Anode and Cathode sides of the PEMFC and large pressure difference across the membrane will eventually lead to decreased life time of the Fuel cell. Hence, it is aimed in this paper to develop and deploy an efficient control strategy which will increase the longevity of the Fuel cell by maintaining the reactant flows to both cathode and anode sides and the pressure difference across the membrane at the desired value, irrespective of the fixed and changing load conditions. The simulation experiments have been performed in MATLAB-SIMULINK environment and the obtained results have proven that the proposed DAFNLC performs much better than the controllers used in the earlier research published works.