Author: Junhong Chen (Xi’an Jiaotong University) - Proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) requires thermal management system to control the operating temperature for safe and effective operation. The aim of this paper is to design an effective temperature controller for the PEMFC combined heat and power system (PEMFC-CHP). This paper first establishes a control-oriented model of the PEMFC-CHP thermal management system, which is a multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) system. According to the Taylor formula, the nonlinear model is linearized at the equilibrium operation point to get the linear state space equations. Then, the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) is designed based on the linear state space equations, which can obtain the optimal control input by solving the riccati equation. The simulation results show that the LQR can achieve much better temperature control effect than PID, the LQR provides smaller overshoot and shorter setting time, and the absolute error integral (IAE) of LQR is noticeably smaller than that of PID, which verify the superiority of LQR. Finally, the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is adopted to optimize the weight matrix of LQR to further improve the temperature control effect.
