On the issue of the PEMFC operating fault identification: Generic analysis tool based on voltage pointwise singularity strengths

Abstract The purpose of this article is to study the portability of a non-intrusive and free of any external/internal disturbance diagnosis tool devoted to the monitoring of the State of Health (SoH) of PEM Fuel Cell (PEMFC) stack. The tool is based on a thorough analysis of the stack voltage signal using a multifractal formalism and wavelet leaders. It offers well-suited signatures indicators on the SoH of the Fuel Cell. Some relevant descriptors extracted from these patterns (singularity features) are used in the frame of Machine Learning approaches to allow the PEMFC fault identification. The proposed diagnosis strategy is evaluated with two different PEMFC stacks. The first one is designed for automotive applications and the second one is dedicated to stationary use (micro combined heat and power - μCHP application). The classification results obtained for the both stacks indicate that the proposed PEMFC diagnosis tool allows identifying simple operating faults as well as more complicated operating situations combining several fault types.