Real-Time Optimization of a CO Preferential Oxidation Reactor Temperature with Extremum Seeking Control Techniques

A hydrogen (H₂)-rich gas mixture is used as the fuel of the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). A small amount of the carbon monoxide (CO) gas in the gas mixture can significantly deactivate the catalyst of the PEMFC, resulting in a reduction in the efficiency of power generation. Preferential oxidation is used to reduce the CO concentration less than 10 ppm in the gas mixture. It has an optimal reaction temperature at which the reaction shows the minimum exit CO concentration with minimum consumption of H₂. This optimal temperature continuously changes under the varying conditions of operation and catalyst deactivation. In this study, two modified extremum seeking control (ESC) methods were proposed to continuously seek and maintain this optimal reaction temperature, guaranteeing CO concentration under 10 ppm even under time-varying conditions. The proposed methods have a smaller number of design parameters than the conventional extremum seeking approaches so that tuning the ESC method is much easier, more intuitive, and efficient. In addition, the proposed method can additionally use the secondary measurement to improve the performance of the ESC method by removing the possibility that the modeling error of the linear dynamic block can deteriorate the accuracy of calculating the gradient of the nonlinear static block. The experimental results confirmed that the proposed methods can track the optimal temperature within a short time compared to the conventional approach while successfully maintaining the CO concentration below 10 ppm.