Dynamic temperature modeling of an SOFC using least squares support vector machines

Cell temperature control plays a crucial role in SOFC operation. In order to design effective temperature control strategies by model-based control methods, a dynamic temperature model of an SOFC is presented in this paper using least squares support vector machines (LS-SVMs). The nonlinear temperature dynamics of the SOFC is represented by a nonlinear autoregressive with exogenous inputs (NARXs) model that is implemented using an LS-SVM regression model. Issues concerning the development of the LS-SVM temperature model are discussed in detail, including variable selection, training set construction and tuning of the LS-SVM parameters (usually referred to as hyperparameters). Comprehensive validation tests demonstrate that the developed LS-SVM model is sufficiently accurate to be used independently from the SOFC process, emulating its temperature response from the only process input information over a relatively wide operating range. The powerful ability of the LS-SVM temperature model benefits from the approaches of constructing the training set and tuning hyperparameters automatically by the genetic algorithm (GA), besides the modeling method itself. The proposed LS-SVM temperature model can be conveniently employed to design temperature control strategies of the SOFC.