Frequency Domain Specification Based Fractional Controller for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell

The primary objective of this manuscript is to suggest analytical tuning rules for controlling the air supply pressure in a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). The controller is designed to effectively regulate the airflow from the supply manifold (SM) to the cathode electrode. Analytical tuning rules are employed to design a novel target loop based fractional control scheme to achieve specific maximum sensitivity (M<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">s</inf>) and phase margin (ϕ). The proposed fractional control technique is evaluated against other recently published integer and fractional-order control techniques. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed design yields a favorable response compared to existing designs, effectively maintaining the pressure in the supply manifold (SM). The suggested controller’s robustness is examined by introducing 20% perturbations in process gain, delay, and both gain and delay. Quantitative performance analysis is conducted using metrics such as integral square error (ISE), integral time absolute error (ITAE), and integral absolute error (IAE), as well as the integral of the square of the control signal (ISU). Furthermore, the performance of the proposed approach is also verified under varying time delays and sinusoidal disturbances, yielding a similar response.