Adaptive Prescribed Performance Control for PEM Fuel Cell Air Supply Systems With Unknown Air Compressor Faults

Tracking of oxygen excess ratio (OER) is key to maintaining the performance and reliability of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). On the one hand, existing OER tracking control schemes do not provide a quantified prescribed performance guarantee. On the other hand, high-frequency operation and load variations mean that the fuel cell air supply system is vulnerable to multiple faults. In this article, an adaptive dynamic surface controller is proposed for OER tracking, with emphasis on prescribed performance and reliability toward faults. An error transformation and a bound estimation approach are introduced to ensure that prescribed convergence rate and maximum overshoot can be retained in the presence of multiple air compressor faults. Moreover, the stability of the closed-loop system is established. Experimental results on a hardware-in-the-loop platform illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.