Data Processing and Performance Analysis of PEMFC Stacks on Urban-Route Buses 2023-01-0487

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells are promising in the application of new energy vehicles and other fields. The performance test and analysis are critical components of the fuel cell research. A general procedure for data processing model and performance analysis method of fuel cell stacks were introduced based on a demonstration project of commercial fuel cell buses in Shanghai.

To build the data processing model, the fixed node method was used to extract the effective operating data of fuel cell stack from the vehicle database. After data cleaning and conversion, taking fuel cell reversible recession into account, the processed data can be obtained. Data that had been processed and a semi-empirical model were used to accurately fit the polarization curve. Polarization curve is a pivotal approach to describe the performance of fuel cells. The entropy method and the frequency statistics method were used to choose and weight the distinctive current densities in the polarization curve. To achieve a more thorough assessment of the performance loss of fuel cell stacks, the voltage degradation under the weighted current density was next examined.

The results show that the data processing approach was effectively fitted to fuel cell stacks, which can quickly extract and process the road data to accurately fit the polarization curve. The voltage degradation was estimated and examined at weighted current density to depict the complete performance of fuel cell stacks. Data from five cars from Shanghai demonstration projects have successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of the whole system, including data processing and performance analysis. This shows that the method is applicable to various types of data obtained through bench or road tests.