Fault-tolerant control for steam fluctuation in SOFC system with reforming units

Abstract Faults of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) systems can affect the characteristics of the stack and inhibit SOFC system commercialization. It has been found that the temperature fluctuation of the burner caused by fluctuation of steam flow rate would greatly affect the temperature of SOFC system and even exceed the safe operation range. Firstly, this paper introduces a mathematical model for the process of steam and natural gas reforming in a real SOFC system. Secondly, the cause of the burner temperature fluctuation is analyzed, and the model to simulate this faulty situation is established. Then, the Bayesian regularization neural network is used for fault diagnosis and good test results are obtained. Finally, fuzzy fault-tolerant control strategy is designed for the thermal safety problem of SOFC system. The simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed fault-tolerant control strategy.