Use of impedance tagging to monitor fuel cell stack performance

Fuel cells are electrochemical device that are traditionally assembled in stacks to perform meaningful work. Monitoring the state of the stack is vitally important to ensure that it is operating efficiently and that constituent cells are not failing for one of a several common reasons including membrane dehydration, gas diffusion layer flooding, reactant starvation, and physical damage. Current state-of-the-art monitoring systems are costly and require at least one connection per cell on the stack, which introduces reliability concerns for stacks consisting of hundreds of cells. This thesis presents a novel approach for diagnosing problems in a fuel cell stack that attempts to reduce the cost and complexity of monitoring cells in a stack. The proposed solution modifies the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) response of each cell in the stack by connecting an electrical tag in parallel with each cell. This approach allows the EIS response of the entire stack to identify and locate problems in the stack. Capacitors were chosen as tags because they do not interfere with normal stack operation and because they can generate distinct stack EIS responses. An experiment was performed in the Center for Automation Technologies an Systems (CATS) fuel cell laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to perform EIS measurements on a single cell with and without capacitor tags to investigate the proposed solution. The EIS data collected from this experiment was used to create a fuel cell model to investigate the proposed solution under ideal conditions. This thesis found that, although the concept shows some promise in simulations, significant obstacles to implementing the proposed solution. Observed EIS response when the capacitor tags were connected did not match the expected EIS response. Constraints on the capacitor tags found by the model impose significant manufacturing challenges to the proposed solution. Further development of the proposed solution is necessary to achieve effective implementation on a real fuel cell stack system due to measurement noise and model imperfections.