Prognostics and Health Management of PEMFC – State of the art and remaining challenges

Fuel Cell systems (FC) represent a promising alternative energy source. However, even if this technology is close to being competitive, it is not ready for large scale industrial deployment: FC still must be optimized, particularly by increasing their limited lifespan. This involves a better understanding of wearing processes and requires emulating the behavior of the whole system. Furthermore, a new area of science and technology emerges: Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) appears to be of great interest to face the problems of health assessment and life prediction of FCs. According to this, the aim of this paper is to present the current state of the art on PHM of FCs, more precisely of Proton-Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFC) stack. PHM discipline is described in order to depict the processing layers that allow early deviations detection, avoiding faults, deciding mitigation actions, and thereby increasing the useful life of FCs. On this basis, a taxonomy of existing works on PHM of PEMFC is given, highlighting open problems to be addressed. The whole enables getting a better understanding of remaining challenging issues in this area.