Exploratory Research On Fuel Cell Control: Design Challenges For Emerging Applications

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The objective of this project is to develop design and analysis tools for these highly nonlinear and complex fuel cell power systems. We will use control theory not only for feedback synthesis, but also to reveal fundamental limits of achievable performance, and to make architectural decisions at an early stage of system design. The tight integration of system components, and the strong interplay between electrochemistry, thermodynamics, and reactor kinetics, give rise to dynamic phenomena that cannot be understood with the physics of individual subsystems in isolation. The development of reduced-order models that capture these dynamic phenomena, and the design of feedback controllers that work in harmony with the inherent physical features of the fuel cell, are timely research directions that would dramatically improve dynamic performance. The PI's strong background in nonlinear control theory and ongoing collaboration with United Technologies Research Center will lead to significant improvements in transient performance for highly dynamic loads, and to reductions in the number of costly system components through rigorous analyses of design trade-offs, and advanced feedback and state estimation algorithms.