In this paper, a fault tolerant control (FTC) strategy for proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells based on the use of virtual actuators and the Takagi–Sugeno (TS) approach is proposed. The overall solution relies on adding a virtual actuator in the control loop to hide the fault from the controller point of view, allowing it to see the same plant as before the fault, such that the stability and some desired performances are preserved. The proposed methodology is based on the use of a reference model, where the resulting nonlinear error model is brought to a Takagi–Sugeno form using a gridding approach. The TS model is suitable for designing a controller using linear matrix inequalities (LMI)-based techniques, such that the resulting closed-loop error system is stable with poles placed in some desired region of the complex plane. Simulation results are used to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

This work has been funded by the Spanish Government (MINECO) through the project CICYT ECOCIS (ref. DPI2013-48243-C2-1-R), by MINECO and FEDER through the project CICYT HARCRICS (ref. DPI2014-58104-R), by AGAUR through the contracts FI-DGR 2014 (ref. 2014FI_B1 00172) and FI-DGR 2015 (ref. 2015FI_B2 00171) and by the DGR of Generalitat de Catalunya (SAC group Ref. 2014/SGR/374). Damiano Rotondo also acknowledges support by the Research Council of Norway through the Centers of Excellence funding scheme, Project number 223254 – Centre for Autonomous Marine Operations and Systems (NTNU-AMOS).

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