Fixed time adaptive fault tolerant sliding mode control of PEMFC air supply system

Guaranteeing rapid management of oxygen excess ratio (OER) for proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) under load variations is a challenge with practical significance. To improve the controller response of PEMFC air supply system, a fixed time fault-tolerant control strategy is proposed in this paper. A fixed convergence time of PEMFC air supply control system is quantified and guaranteed by the proposed method and the control response can be accelerated by reducing the setting time. The contributions of this paper is fourfold. Firstly, the manifold leakage fault is estimated by fixed time fault observer, which can improve the real-time fault tracking performance of the control system. Secondly, a hierarchical fixed time sliding mode controller is proposed to regulate the OER rapidly. Furthermore, a novel adaptive term is employed to reduce the effects of the chattering from fault observer in the outer loop. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on a real-time PEMFC simulation platform. Experimental results on a Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) platform show that the proposed fixed time fault tolerant control strategy has the characteristics of fast response and high robustness. © 2023 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC.