Passive Fault Tolerant Control of PEMFC air feeding system

•A Passive Fault Tolerant Control Strategy (PFTCS) is performed against air feeding fault.•The PFTCS, based on a self-tuning PID controller, is validated on a real PEMFC.•Performance of the PFTCS are experimentally compared to a classical PID controller.•Unlike the PID, the PFTCS shows satisfactory performance during faulty operations.•The PFTCS efficiently regulates the oxygen stoichiometry under faulty situations.

In this paper, a Passive Fault Tolerant Control strategy dedicated to air feeding system fault based on an auto-tuning PID regulator is designed and implemented on a real fuel cell test bench. The present work compares the auto-tuning PID strategy performance to classical PID controller and highlights its benefits during faulty operation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to regulate oxygen stoichiometry in real-time operation while maintaining a proper system performance under faulty situations. Unlike the classical PID controller, the proposed Passive Fault Tolerant Control System shows highly satisfactory performance in terms of setpoint tracking accuracy and disturbances rejection capability during faulty operations.