A data-driven method for multi-step-ahead prediction and long-term prognostics of proton exchange membrane fuel cell

Fuel cell technology has been rapidly developed in the last decade owing to its clean characteristic and high efficiency. Proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are increasingly used in transportation applications and small stationary applications; however, the cost and the unsatisfying durability of the PEMFC stack have limited their successful commercialization and market penetration. In recent years, thanks to the availability and the quality of emerging data of PEMFCs, digitization is happening to offer possibilities to increase the productivity and the flexibility in fuel cell applications. Therefore, it is crucial to clarify the potential of digitization measures, how and where they can be applied, and their benefits. This paper focuses on the degradation performance of the PEMFC stacks and develops a data-driven intelligent method to predict both the short-term and long-term degradation. The dilated convolutional neural network is for the first time applied for predicting the time-dependent fuel cell performance and is proved to be more efficient than other recurrent networks. To deal with the long-term performance uncertainty, a conditional neural network is proposed. Results have shown that the proposed method can predict not only the degradation tendency, but also contain the degradation behaviour dynamics. •A dilated CNN is applied for the multi-step-ahead fuel cell degradation prediction.•An attention block is combined to improve the prediction performance.•The prediction performance is compared with three other RNN prediction tools.•A conditional CNN is proposed to improve the long-term prognostics performance.