Level Set Method-Based Identification of Locations and Shapes of Fuel Cell Defects

Abstract

Nondestructive inspection of the sizes and positions of defect regions in a fuel cell is an indispensable task in order to ensure their practical use. In the present paper, a level set method for estimating the defects in a membrane electrode assembly (MEA) in fuel cells is proposed. Boundaries of the defects in the MEA are represented by a zero contour of a level set function. By updating the function, the shapes and positions of the defect regions can be identified. A cost function for updating the level set function consists of the mean squared error between the magnetic fields computed by a 2-D model and sensor data and the regularization terms for the estimated shapes. The magnetic fields were measured using magnetic impedance sensors. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through numerical simulations and experiments.

Keywords

• fuel cells
• inverse problems
• level set methods