Fuel Cells Remaining Useful Lifetime Forecasting Using Echo State Network

Abstract

The Hydrogen energy vector is one of the possible solutions to overcome future energy crisis announced by the International Energy Agency. However, various bottleneck, whether technological or societal, slow the industrial interest for this technology and therefore the mass production of fuel cells. Among these locks that may be mentioned one relating to the still limited useful lifetime of the fuel cells. To improve this lifetime, one of the existing approaches is to use the discipline of PHM (for Prognostics and Health Management). This discipline aims to improve the efficiency of control and maintenance operations on the system by using diagnostic or prognostics algorithms. This article covers the prognostics aspect of PHM applied to a PEMFC using an algorithm based on a tool from the reservoir computing discipline to predict the Remaining Useful Lifetime.