Carbon monoxide adaptive observer for fuel cell fault detection

For the purpose of fault detection in a reformate supplied fuel cell system, an adaptive observer is proposed in this paper to estimate the carbon monoxide (CO) molar fraction within the inlet gas of the fuel cell. Though CO accounts only for a small fraction in the hydrogen rich reformate, when ads...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Di Penta, Damiano, Bencherif, Karim, Zhang, Qinghua, Sorine, Michel
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation models
Adaptive Observer
Adaptive systems
Algorithms
Anodes
Atmospheric modeling
Carbon monoxide
Electric potential
Estimates
Estimating
Fault Detection
Fuel Cell
Fuel cells
Hydrogen
Mathematical model
Mathematical models
Observers
Reduced Model
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Summary:For the purpose of fault detection in a reformate supplied fuel cell system, an adaptive observer is proposed in this paper to estimate the carbon monoxide (CO) molar fraction within the inlet gas of the fuel cell. Though CO accounts only for a small fraction in the hydrogen rich reformate, when adsorbed on the anode catalyst layer, it can considerably reduce the cell voltage, which is dangerous for the system. A high CO rate is thus an important fault indicator, however, existing sensors for CO molar fraction measurement in a gas flow are not suited to on-board applications. It is then useful to design an algorithm for its estimation from available mesurements. A reduced model based on electrochemical phenomena is first briefly described and validated with experimental data. Then, we present the adaptive observer estimating the CO molar fraction, associated with a robust fault detection criterion. Finally, the algorithm is validated on transient experiments.
DOI:10.23919/ECC.2007.7068441