Health management review for fuel cells: Focus on action phase

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells offer a sustainable solution to electrical power generation and combined power and heat applications, even if they still encounter durability and reliability challenges. Prognostics and health management (PHM) is a promising solution to enhance the durability and reliability of fuel cell systems by providing information on fuel cell health status, predicting future performance, and prescribing optimal operational actions. Generally, the PHM technique can be divided into observation, analysis, and action phases. In this review, the state-of-the-art fuel cell PHM studies concerning the three phases of the PHM method are summarized. Hybrid fuel cell systems composed of single and multi-stack are investigated. The paper covers the main degradation mechanisms of fuel cell key components and existing durability datasets in the observation phase. The study of defining a proper health indicator and prediction of future health states of fuel cells, namely, prognostics are reviewed in the analysis phase. The outputs from the previous two phases are intended to be integrated into the action phase for optimizing the operational decisions that are responsible for achieving durable and reliable fuel cell systems. The objective of this review is three-fold: (1) to put together the existing studies of fuel cell durability and reliability-related studies into a PHM cycle and summarize the development status of each phase, (2) to identify the research gaps in existing PHM studies, and (3) to provide future perspectives for fuel cell PHM studies to achieve the ultimate goal of enhancing fuel cell system durability and reliability.