The durability and reliability of producing high quality power for long periods of time have the potential to be the leading marketing factors for future hydrogen and fuel cell power sources. Improvements to current real-world environment durability levels, and hence improving the performance criteria, is limited by: (i) a lack of understanding of the state of the cell/stack, (ii) the lack of ability to deal with data currently obtained in an informed manner, and (iii) the limited support and decision making throughout the lifecycle to optimise performance.
The vision of this proposal is to develop an optimal integrated fuel cell system design, encompassing an intelligent health monitoring capability, to enable maximised lifecycle performance. This will be achieved within a real-time dynamic and adaptive intelligent lifecycle infrastructure yielding the increased optimised performance of cells (e.g. self: -monitoring, -adapting, -optimising and –protecting). Providing an intelligent information infrastructure leading to smarter, optimised cells will require leading edge research to semantically model relationships between the cell and environmental data coupled with the necessity of performance techniques which enable systems to be optimally designed for reliability, with an intelligent diagnostic and prognostic capability.