Degradation thermodynamic model of PEMFC for prognostics and health state evaluation

• Grant number: 24/00161-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: October 01, 2024
• End date: November 30, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Mechanical Engineering - Thermal Engineering
• Principal Investigator: José Alexandre Matelli
• Grantee: João Pedro Ribeiro Rosa
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Engenharia (FEG). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Guaratinguetá. Guaratinguetá , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In a context of increasing energy demand and rising problems due to carbon emissions, fuel cells appear as a promising solution to the energy transaction necessity. However, its low durability and high costs still prevents its large-scale commercialization. The degradation of the fuel cell's performance can be caused by many reasons such as: thermal and mechanical stresses, humidity conditions and start/stop conditions. Still, the degradation of fuel cells is not fully understood. To extend the fuel cell's lifespan, prognostics and health management (PHM) are gaining attention. PHM aims to estimate the remaining useful life of system (RUL) and degradation trends in order to help corrective maintenance to be taken. There are two main prognostics approaches: data-driven methods and model-based methods. Even though data-driven methods can be more precise in the estimation of the RUL and are easier to be implemented, they suffer from overfitting problems and require expert knowledge to fine-tune the state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, there are not many available datasets from aging experiments, especially from experiments operating on dynamic load. In this master project, it is proposed a model-based prognostic method obtained through a thermodynamic analysis of the fuel cell and an aging experiment operating on dynamic load. Some results that can be expected from the aging experiment are a decay in the stacks' output voltage, an increase in the fuel consumption, a decrease in the electrochemical surface area (ECSA) and an increase in the degradation rate at higher temperatures and relative humidity.