Remaining useful life prediction of PEMFC based on long short-term memory recurrent neural networks

Abstract To solve the prediction problem of proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) remaining useful life (RUL), a novel RUL prediction approach of PEMFC based on long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks (RNN) has been developed. The method uses regular interval sampling and locally weighted scatterplot smoothing (LOESS) to realize data reconstruction and data smoothing. Not only the primary trend of the original data can be preserved, but noise and spikes can be effectively removed. The LSTM RNN is adopted to estimate the remaining life of test data. 1154-hour experimental aging analysis of PEMFC shows that the prediction accuracy of the novel method is 99.23%, the root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) is 0.003 and 0.0026 respectively. The comparison analysis shows that the prediction accuracy of the novel method is 28.46% higher than that of back propagation neural network (BPNN). Root mean square error, relative error (RE) and mean absolute error are all much smaller than that of BPNN. Therefore, the novel method can quickly and accurately forecast the residual service life of the fuel cell.