Robust health indicator extraction and RUL prediction for PEMFCs under highly dynamic industrial conditions

Abstract

Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFCs) are increasingly deployed in clean energy systems, such as GEH2 hydrogen generators, where they operate under highly dynamic and unpredictable load conditions. Accurate prediction of their Remaining Useful Life (RUL) is essential for ensuring reliable, cost-effective, and proactive maintenance strategies. However, conventional voltage-based Health Indicators (HIs) are highly sensitive to power fluctuations and fail to provide consistent degradation trends in real-world industrial scenarios, particularly when system usage varies significantly across different clients, as in the GEH2 case. In this paper, we propose a scalable two-stage framework for RUL prediction of PEMFCs operating under such conditions. First, we introduce a machine learning-based method to extract a degradation-specific Health Indicator directly from voltage measurements, effectively filtering out transient operational effects. Second, we develop a hybrid deep learning architecture that combines Transformer networks and Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) to model temporal dependencies and provide accurate RUL predictions under dynamic conditions. The proposed approach is validated on a real-world industrial dataset collected from three PEMFC stacks deployed in GEH2 systems operating under highly variable conditions. Comparative results show that our method consistently outperforms baseline machine learning and deep learning models, achieving superior accuracy, robustness, and generalization across diverse mission profiles.