Fault Tolerant Control of a PEM Fuel Cell using qLPV Virtual Actuators

This paper proposes a fault tolerant control (FTC) strategy based on the use of quasi-linear parameter varying (qLPV) virtual actuators approach for proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells. The overall solution relies on adding a virtual actuator in the control loop to hide the fault from the controller point of view, allowing it to see the same plant as before the fault, in this way keeping the stability and some desired performances. The proposed methodology is based on the use of a reference model, where the resulting nonlinear error model is brought to a qLPV form that is used for control design by means of linear matrix inequalities (LMI)-based techniques. The resulting closed-loop error system is stable with poles placed in some desired region of the complex plane. Simulation results are used to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.