Observer-based Model Predictive Control Design for Air Supply System of Automotive PEM Fuel Cells

The air supply system control strategy is a significant challenge issue of PEM(Polymer Electrolyte Membrane) fuel cells. In this paper, an observer-based model predictive control scheme is proposed for oxygen excess ratio control to avoid the oxygen starvation without using physical sensor of oxygen excess ratio based on a nonlinear dynamic model. Firstly, a sliding mode PI observer is proposed to estimate the cathode pressure and oxygen excess ratio, and the convergence is also discussed by a constructed Lyapunov function. Then, the observer-based model predictive controller is designed for the oxygen excess ratio control. Finally, the simulation validation is demonstrated to validate the effectiveness of the proposed observer and the control scheme by a high fidelity model.