Resilient MIMO Control for Fuel Cell Oxygen Supply With Adaptive Performance Guarantee: Design and Implementation

The simultaneous regulation of oxygen flow and pressure is critical to the safety and resilience of hydrogen fuel cells. However, nonlinear couplings between flow and pressure, frequent load variations, and external disturbances pose challenges to the control task. This article introduces a novel multi-input multi-output (MIMO) controller that offers adaptive performance guarantees. Different from most existing controllers for fuel cell oxygen supply, the proposed nonlinear controller eliminates model mismatch issues caused by system linearization and state decoupling. An explicit performance boundary is provided in the form of a novel barrier function, which relaxes the performance requirement during rapid load transients and strong disturbances. Moreover, a novel disturbance utilization approach is enabled via smooth functions to utilize the useful components of system uncertainties. Experimental validations conducted on a hardware-in-the-loop system and a high-power fuel cell oxygen supply platform demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms conventional prescribed performance control and contemporary fuel cell control methods.