SOFC In-Field Test of a Tool for Advanced Monitoring, Diagnostics and Lifetime Prognostics

Accurate state-of-health (SoH) monitoring is considered a key element in avoiding faulty operation of fuel cell stacks. Such faulty operation could relate to problems in the balanceof-plant, having a global effect on the stack performance, or to problems in the stack itself, where the effect could initially be very local. This research topic was addressed in the European project INSIGHT, with the final aim to demonstrate advanced SoH monitoring in a real environment by implementing newly developed hardware equipped with novel perturbation routines and data fitting routines in a µ-CHP system from SOLIDpower. The results of the test that followed, including validation of the routines and hardware as well as simulation of different kinds of faulty operation, are reported here.