Verified Stability Analysis for Interval-Based Sliding Mode and Predictive Control Procedures with Applications to High-Temperature Fuel Cell Systems

In previous work, control-oriented models have been derived for solid oxide high-temperature fuel cell systems. In these models, interval variables have been used to describe uncertainty due to a limited knowledge about system parameters and to handle effects of electric load variations on the temperature distribution in the fuel cell stack module as well as bounded measurement uncertainty. To deal with these types of uncertainty both in the design of robust controllers and during their online usage, interval techniques can be employed successfully. These control procedures make use of the basic principles of either sliding mode control or predictive control. The corresponding algorithms and the prerequisites for their real-time capable implementation using software libraries for interval arithmetic and algorithmic differentiation are described in this paper. Experimental results show the efficiency of these control laws for a fuel cell test rig that is available at the Chair of Mechatronics at the University of Rostock.