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REEM IZZELDIN ELSADIG SALIM
Department of Electrical Engineering
College of Engineering
Title
Thermal Analysis for the Purpose of Fault Diagnosis of Commercial Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells
(PEMFC)
Faculty Advisor
Prof. Hassan Noura
Defense Date
25 April 2016
Abstract
The world’s awareness towards the amount of destruction that our extensive and ignorant lifestyles in the
past few decades have imposed on the environment is growing day after day. This resulted in an increased
governmental and research interest towards the development and use of green technology. Fuel cells
are one of the green technologies that received a major share of research interest in the past decade.
However, despite their promising features, fuel cell systems still lack a solid fault diagnosis and predictive
maintenance study. There are numerous faults that have to be detected and diagnosed on a fuel cell
system, ranging from chemical faults, to electrical and power electronics faults such as reactant leakages
inside the fuel cell, flooding and drying of the membrane, reactive gas feeding, etc.
The aim of this dissertation is to develop and implement a model based fault diagnostic scheme for a
commercial Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) system despite the lack of important system
information. The effect of sever environmental conditions of hot climate countries such as the UAE on
commercial PEMFC systems, will also be studied and analyzed through the development of a dynamic
system model.
Dissertation