Research on power operation typical characteristic state of proton exchange membrane fuel cell based on principal component analysis

The stability, reliability, and lifespan of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are closely related to power dynamic response. Therefore, it is necessary to study in depth the relationship between the power operation state and typical characteristics. In this paper, the fuel cell system (FCS) power dynamic response based on constant power change amplitude and various power change amplitude is analyzed. Then, three typical power characteristics of the FCS, namely, low single-cell voltage, drastic voltage uniformity change, voltage undershoot and voltage overshoot, are investigated. Furthermore, to solve the high-dimensional datasets problem, a quick evaluation method based on data dimensionality reduction (DDR) is proposed. The innovation of this method is based on principal component analysis to extract typical characteristic relationships of power operation levels. The results demonstrate that the extracted new one-dimensional (1-D) eigenvectors index exhibits a positive correlation with power levels. Meanwhile, the power operation state empirical model is established through data regression. The Pearson coefficients of the empirical model are all greater than 0.9981. Thus, the new index and proposed method offer novel insights for improving the power adaptive control of fuel cells and quickly assessing their health state.