A health management review of proton exchange membrane fuel cell for electric vehicles: Failure mechanisms, diagnosis techniques and mitigation measures

Hydrogen-fed proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) have been widely explored and applied as the power units in the electric vehicles. However, their life-span under the dynamic operation conditions of the vehicles needs to be further improved in terms of commercialization. Numerous studies on degradation/failure diagnosis and health prediction techniques have emerged in the related disciplines, which are dedicate to solve the service life of PEMFC systems. This paper aims to reviewing the new development of the state of health (SOH) prediction of PEMFC systems based on the in-depth analysis of the failure mechanisms of PEMFC, including the diagnostic techniques, the health indicator (HI) approaches and the innovative application of effectiveness of these techniques and approaches, and provide a detail health mitigation schemes and techniques which ultimately play the role in extending the service life of the PEMFC systems after completing the judgment of the SOH of the stack system. This paper discusses that although the findings of existing diagnostic techniques and mitigation solutions have greatly improved the major bottlenecks of PEMFC systems, but most of them still have limitations in practical application. In addition, the challenges in the current state of technology on health prediction and mitigation approaches for PEMFC systems are presented at the end of this paper, while proposing future research directions for accelerating commercialization of PEMFC system-based electric vehicles.