Sensitivity analysis of temperature uncertainty in an aircraft PEM fuel cell

Nowadays, growing interest in the application of renewable energy sources has led to a rapid development of more environmentally sustainable and green thinking applications. The application of fuel cell technology to aircraft propulsion and/or auxiliary energy supply is becoming of great interest for undoubted advantages in terms of pollution emissions, noise reduction and lower dependency on oil price and availability. In 2006 European Commission founded the ENFICA-FC project, coordinated by Politecnico di Torino, whose aim was to develop new all-electric and more-electric aircraft concepts and to directly prove the feasibility of such designs by flying an all-electric general aviation aircraft powered by hydrogen fuel cells. Reliability of fuel cell system is a very important aspect for the safety of these aircraft, but experimental data concerning fuel cell systems in aeronautics are still unavailable to scientific community. This paper presents the research activity done by authors to support the design of “fuel cell aircrafts” from the failure analysis point of view; classic approaches to structural reliability are here applied to rank the importance of the failures of sensors used by fuel cell control logic in order to support the definition of accurate Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis (Risk matrix).

► We developed a dynamic model of a PEM fuel cell for aeronautical application.
► We need a better understanding of reliability of fuel cell in aeronautics.
► We propose probabilistic methodology to evaluate relative importance of system sensors.