Fuel Cell degradation cannot be avoided or ignored, regardless if durability is the current testing focus. Especially on the fuel cell system testing level, unit-under-tests (UUTs) are a limited resource and are often used for many calibration activities.
Online Fuel Cell degradation monitoring is demonstrated to give operators immediate feedback when harmful conditions are experienced. The stresses are tracked over the lifetime of the UUT to ensure the test engineer is aware of the current state of the UUT, across any testbed.
Furthermore, it is demonstrated that these stress factors can be used for calibration to improve system design and control strategy optimization with trade-offs between these stress factors and other key parameters. This can be already performed early in the design process through virtualization and further inputs to the next iteration of development through real testing results.
Key topics and takeways:
- Get an overview of degradation mechanisms
- Learn about AVL’s toolchain to monitor degradation in real time
- Apply learnings about stress factors in the calibration process
- Accelerate the development by virtualization and agile design iteration based on real testing results