On active disturbance rejection in temperature regulation of the proton exchange membrane fuel cells

• Unknown dynamics and disturbances of PEMFC are regarded as a total disturbance.
• An extended state observer (ESO) is used to estimate the total disturbance.
• Active disturbance rejection control with switching law is designed for the system.
• Temperature of PEMFC can be stabilized under internal and external disturbances.

Operating a Proton Exchange Membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) system to maintain the stack temperature stable is one of the key issues in PEMFC's normal electrochemical reaction process. Its temperature characteristic is easily affected by inlet gas humidity, external disturbances, and electrical load changes and so on. Because of the complexity and nonlinearity of the reaction process, it is hard to build a model totally consistent with the real characteristic of the process. If model uncertainty, external disturbances, parameters changes can be regarded as “total disturbance”, which is then estimated and compensated, the accurate model is no longer required and the control design can be greatly simplified to meet the practical needs. Based on this idea, an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) with a switching law is proposed for the problem of precise temperature regulation in PEMFC. Results of the work show that the proposed control system allows the PEMFC to operate successfully at the temperature of 343 K point in the presence of two different disturbances.