4th International Conference on Electrical Engineering (ICEE 2015)

IGEE, Boumerdes, December 13th -15th, 2015

Fuzzy Self-Tuning PID Controller for Air Supply on

a PEM Fuel Cell system
Z. BAROUD, M. BENMILOUD, A. BENALIA
LACoSERE laboratory, Amar Telidji University
Laghouat, Algeria
{z.baroud, med.benmiloud, a.benalia}@lagh-univ.dz
Abstract: This paper presents a fuzzy self-tuning PID
controller for air supply on a Proton Exchange Membrane
(PEM) fuel cell system. The control objective is to adjust the
oxygen excess ratio at the suitable value in order to prevent
oxygen starvation and damage. The proposed control scheme is
separated into two parts: fuzzy tuner and classical PID
controller. The parameters of PID controller are adapted by
means of fuzzy tuner. Feedforward and classical PID are
compared to validate the performance of the fuzzy self-tuning
PID control strategy. The simulation results demonstrate that the
proposed technique improves the dynamic performance of
oxygen excess ratio than classical PID.
Keywords : PEM fuel cell system, Air supply system, oxygen
excess ratio, Classical PID, Fuzzy self-tuning PID.

I. INTRODUCTION
The serious environmental pollution and energy crisis
around the world are driving innovation on new energy sources
such as solar, wind, geothermal or hydrogen. Among these,
fuel cells are electrochemical devices that produce electricity,
water and heat from hydrogen and oxygen [1].
Among all types of fuel cells, The proton exchange
membrane (PEM) fuel cell, also called solid polymer fuel cell
(SPFC), is particularly suitable for use in wide range
applications, with advantages of high efficiency, low weight,
low pollution and low operation temperature (50C to 100C)
which allows fast starting times. However, short lifetime and
high expenses has hindered their vast applicability in common
system up to now [1]. As a result, in order to improve the
performance, enhance the lifetime and reduce the production
costs, the optimization of system design and materials as well
as effective control strategies are essential.
Many control strategies have been proposed containing
dynamic feedforward and linear quadratic regulator [2] and
[11], nonlinear control [3], sliding mode control [1] and [4],
model predictive control [5] and Fuzzy logic control [6], [7]
and [8]. These control methods are applied for the
manipulation of the oxygen excess ratio in PEM fuel cells with
various degree of success.
A Fuzzy self-tuning PID controller is proposed in this paper
in order to regulate the oxygen excess ratio at a desired value
when the stack current changes. The proposed control scheme
is separated into two parts: fuzzy tuner and classical PID
controller. The parameters of PID controller are adapted by
means of fuzzy tuner. The dynamic model used in this paper to

validate the proposed controller is a reduced version of the

ninth-order state model proposed by Pukrushpan et al. [9].
This paper is organized in the following way: the
mathematical model of the PEM fuel cell Air supply system
and control objective are explained in section II. In section III
the control scheme of fuzzy self-tuning PID controller are
designed. The design control strategy is applied to the model of
PEM fuel cell system and its simulation results are shown in
section IV. Finally main conclusions are presented in section
V.
II. PEM FUEL CELL SYSTEM MODEL
A. Nonlinear model
The PEM fuel cell system almost included five main
subsystems: the air flow (breathing), the hydrogen flow, the
humidity, the stack electrochemistry and the stack temperature
subsystem, respectively. In [9], it is assumed that the
temperature and humidity of input reactant flows are well
regulated by dedicated controllers. In addition, it is considered
that sufficient compressed hydrogen is available, and therefore
the main attention is focused on the air management. Under
these assumptions, we present a fourth-order state space model
which is a reduced version of the ninth-order model presented
by Pukrushpan et al. The model equations can be seen in the
table. I and the constants are summarized in the table. II. The
details of the model used in this study and the numerical values
can be found in [2] and [9].
The nonlinear state equations in table .I have the form
x = f (x, u, w) (state equations)

T
x = pO2 , p N 2 , cp , p sm

u = vcm
w = I
st

(1)

Where the control input u is the compressor motor voltage

allows the manipulation of the air feed and, as
consequence, the oxygen supply to the fuel cell stack. The
measurable disturbance input w is the stack current I st . The
vcm which

system output

h y = h y1 , h y 2 , h y 3

supply manifold pressure

h y = x4
2

is the stack voltage h y1 = v st

and the air flow rate through

the compressor h y3 = Wcp respectively. For further details on the

functions h y1 and h y3 see the publications [2] and [9]. The
performance variables z = [z1 , z 2 ]T with z1 as net power and
as oxygen excess ratio are also given in the table. I.

2015 IEEE

z2

TABLE I.

c3 x1 (x1 , x2 )
c7 w
c4 x1 + c5 x2 + c6

x1 = c1 (x4 )
x 2 = c8 (x4 )

x3 = c9 x3

c10
x3

EQUATION OF THE NONLINEAR MODELL

c3 x2 (x1 , x2 )
c4 x1 + c5 x2 + c6

c12

x4
c 1 h y 3 (x3 , x4 ) + c13u
11

z2 =

c12

x 4 = c14 1 + c15 4 1 h y3 (x3 , x4 ) c16 (x4 )

c11

= x1 + x2 + c 2

Due to the lack of space wee will just indicate the important
points in the rest of paper. Thiis section presents the design of
fuzzy self-tuning PID controllerr.

ci = cte. i = 1,..........24

c1 =

CONSTANTS OF THE NONLINEAR MO

ODEL

RTst kca ,in xO2 , atm

M O2 Vca 1 + atm

c15 =

cp

c2 = psat

c16 = kca ,in

RTst
c3 =
Vca

c17 =

c4 = M O 2

c18 =

c5 = M N 2

RTst kca ,in 1 xO2 , atm

M N 2 Vca 1 + atm
kk
c9 = cm t v
J cp Rcm

c10 =

C pTatm
J cp cp

c11 = patm

1
c12 =

c13 =

cm kt
J cp Rcm

RTatm
c14 =
M a, atmVsm

RTst

c20 =

c21 =

+1
2 2

1
Rcm

c22 = kv
c23 = k ca ,in

c24 =

Fuzzy self-tuning PID conttroller means that the three-term

control k p , k i and kd are tuned by using fuzzy tuner [10]. The
D controller are not always tuned
coefficients of the classical PID
for the nonlinear plant with unppredictable parameter variations.
So, it is necessary to automatiically tune the PID parameters.
The oxygen excess ratio control based on fuzzy self-tuning PID
controller is shown in Figure.1

xO2 , atm
1 + atm

nM O2
4F

xO2 ,atm =

atm =

yO2 ,atm M O2
M a ,atm

Mv

(3)

B. Fuzzy self-tuning PID Coontroller

1 2

RTst

d
e(t )
dt

Where e(t ) is the error signal.

+1

C D AT

A. PID Controller
u
in industrial process control
The PID control is widely used
due to their simple structure andd to their robust performance for
both linear and nonlinear systeem. The implementation of PID
control, as shown in (3), needss finding suitable values for the
gain parameters k p , k i and kd . And
A which are selected based on
the optimization methods.
u PID (t ) = k p e(t ) + k i e(t )dt + k d

2 1

c19 =
+1

RTst n
4 FVca

c8 =

2
1

CD AT

c6 = M v psat
c7 =

(2)

ROL DESIGN
III. CONTR

c23 (x4 )
c24 w

TABLE II.

WO2 ,in
WO2 ,rct

If the value of z 2 is too low, even though higher than 1, it is

likely to cause Oxygen starvvation. This phenomenon can
cause a short circuit and hot sppot on the surface of membrane
cell. On the other hand, a higgher values of z 2 will drive the
auxiliary system to consume more
m
power. And therefore, lower
the system efficiency. Conseqquently, it is necessary to use
efficient control method to reggulate the oxygen excess ratio in
order to prevent oxygen starvaation and reduce extra parasitic
power loss.

c18
c
c 12
c
c c11
1 11 , if 11 > c19
17

c
if 11 c19
c 20 ,

z1 = h y ( x1 , x 2 ) w c 21u (u c 22 x3 )
1
z2 =

B. Control Objective
The main control objective for the PEM fuel cell system is
regulating the oxygen excess ratio z 2 , the air excess ratio is
defined by the amount of oxygen
o
provided WO2 ,in and the
amount of oxygen reacted WO2 ,rcct , which is described as

atm p sat

M a,atm p atm aatm p sat

Fig. 1. Fuzzy self-tuning PID Controller structure

Regarding to the fuzzy tuner, there are two inputs to fuzzy

inference e and e , and three outputs k p , k i and kd . The actual
range of e and e is [-3, 3] and [-30, 30], which can be
converted to [-1, 1] by multiplying the factors. The outputs
range k p , ki and k d are [0, 1000], [0, 2000] and [0, 1]
respectively. The fuzzy subsets of input are small, middle, and
large and the output fuzzy subsets are small, middle, and large.
The basic form of fuzzy control rules is: if the error e and the
error derivation e is A and B, then the fuzzy control outputs
are k p , ki and k d . The membership functions of inputs and
outputs are respectively showed in Fig.2. And the fuzzy control
rules are obtained by table .III.
(a)

Middle

1 Small

Large

to maintain the oxygen excess ratio at 2.05 and minimizing the

parasitic power consumption. Fig.5, Fig.6 and Fig.7 show the
simulation results for the controlling z 2 using feedforward,
classical PID and fuzzy self-tuning PID control strategies,
respectively. The comparison criterion is given in table .IV, as
it is obvious the fuzzy self-tuning PID controller has a better
response compared to other techniques.
In addition the proposed technique has a better performance
toward the instantaneous disturbance rise. The settling time for
the classical PID and the feedforward are 140ms and 310ms,
respectively reduced to 70ms in the fuzzy self-tuning PID
control scheme (Fig.9). The results show that the fuzzy selftuning PID controller is more sensitive to stack current
variations.
300
Stack Current (A)

Where e is the error between oxygen excess ratio setpoint

and its output and e is the derivation of error. The PID
parameters are tuned by using fuzzy tuner, which provide a
nonlinear mapping from e and e of error to PID parameters.

250
200
150
100

0,5

50
0
0

10

15

20

25

30

35

Fig. 3. Stack current variation

-1

-0,5

0,5

Small

Middle

Large

280

(b)

FF
Stack Voltage (V)

0,5

0.5

PID

260

FSTPID

240
220
200

10

15

20

25

30

35

Fig. 4. Stack voltage variation

Fig. 2. Membership functions for (a) e and e , and (b) k p , k i and k d

2,3

k p , ki , k d

SMALL
MIDDLE
LARGE

SMALL

MIDDLE

MSS
LMM
LLL

MSS
MMS
MLS

LARGE
LSS
MMS
SLS

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

The fuzzy self-tuning PID control scheme is applied to the
PEM fuel cell system model. The main objective control is to
define the compressor motor input voltage u (t ) = vcm in order

Oxyen Excess Ratio

TABLE. III FUZZY RULES FOR TUNING PID PARAMETERS

2.1
1,8
1.5

FF
Setpoint

1,2
0.9

10

15

20

25

30

Fig. 5. Oxygen excess ratio variation using feedforward control

35

TABLE. IV PERFORMANCE INDEX COMPARISON

PERFORMANCE

Oxygen Excess Ratio

1.5
PID

INDEX

PERCENTAGE
OVERSHOOT

RISE TIME

SETTLING TIME
(5%)

FSTPID

13.65

0.17

0.140

PID

9.037

0.55

0.070

FF

12.25

0.75

0.310

Setpoint

10

15

20

25

30

In this study, a reduced PEM fuel cell system model is

proposed, which presents cathode mass flow transients. Based
on this model, a fuzzy self-tuning PID controller is design to
regulate the oxygen excess ratio in order to avoid oxygen
starvation when stack current suddenly change. The PID
controller parameters are adapted simultaneously using the
fuzzy tuner. The simulation results show that the fuzzy selftuning PID control has the better control effect than classical
PID control. However, the proposed control strategy needs to
be tested for the case of variable oxygen excess ratio.

Oxygen Excess ratio

Fig. 6. Oxygen excess ratio variation using classical PID control

1.5

V. Conclusions

35

FSTPID
Setpoint

10

15

20

25

30

REFERENCES
35

t(s)

Fig. 7. oxygen excess ratio variation using fuzzy self-tuning PID control

Oxygen Excess ratio

2.5

2
FF

1.5

Setpoint
PID
FSTPID

1
0

10

15

20

25

30

35

t(s)

Fig. 8. Response of oxygen excess ratio for different control strategies

Oxygen Excess ratio

2.2
2
1.8
FF

1.6

Setpoint
PID
FSTPID

1.4
9.5

10

10.5

11

t (s)

Fig. 9. The zoomed plot of oxygen excess ratio variation at t=10 s

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