Intelligent Health Status Detection Method for Locomotive Fuel Cell Based on Data-Driven Techniques

Main drawbacks of fuel cell systems, namely, high cost, poor reliability, and short lifespan, limit the large-scale commercial application of fuel cell systems. The health status detection of fuel cell systems for locomotives is of great significance to the safe and stable operation of locomotives. To identify the failure modes of the fuel cell system accurately and quickly, this study proposed an intelligent health status detection method for locomotive fuel cells based on data-driven techniques. In this study, the actual test data of a 150-kW fuel cell system for locomotives was analyzed. The t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) algorithm was combined with the general regression neural network (GRNN) to intelligently detect the health status of the fuel cell system for locomotives. Specifically, t-SNE was used to process the high-dimensionality and strong coupling raw data of health status, enabling the dimensional reduction of the raw data to reflect essential features. Then, GRNN was used to identify the feature data to achieve the fast and accurate detection of the health status of the fuel cell system. Results show that the proposed method can effectively detect four health conditions, namely, normal state, high inlet coolant temperature, low air pressure, and low spray pump pressure, with a diagnostic accuracy of 98.75%. This study is applicable to the analysis of the actual measurement data of high-power level fuel cell systems and provides a reference for the health status detection of fuel cell systems for locomotives. Keywords: fuel cell system for locomotive; data-driven; general regression neural network; t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding; health status detection