Study of Resistance Extraction Methods for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells Based on Static Resistance Correction

Abstract

Accurate extraction of polarization resistance is crucial in the application of proton exchange membrane fuel cells. It is generally assumed that the steady-state resistance obtained from the polarization curve model is equivalent to the AC impedance obtained from the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) when the frequency approaches zero. However, due to the low-frequency stability and nonlinearity issues of the EIS method, this dynamic process leads to an additional rise in polarization resistance compared to the steady-state method. In this paper, a semi-empirical model and equivalent circuit models are developed to extract the steady-state and dynamic polarization resistances, respectively, while a static internal resistance correction method is proposed to represent the systematic error between the two. With the correction, the root mean square error of the steady-state resistance relative to the dynamic polarization resistance decreases from 26.12% to 7.42%, indicating that the weighted sum of the static internal resistance and the steady-state resistance can better correspond to the dynamic polarization resistance. The correction method can also simplify the EIS procedure by directly generating an estimate of the dynamic polarization resistance in the full current interval.

Keywords

• electrochemical impedance spectroscopy
• equivalent circuit model
• polarization curve
• proton exchange membrane fuel cell
• resistance extraction