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Professor Huei Peng and Associate Professor Anna Stefanopoulou with their research group. From left (front) are Stefanopoulou, Denise McKay, Katherine
Peterson (now at Purdue), Ardalan Vahidi (now at Clemson), Kyung-Won Suh, Ming-Joon Kim, Peng, Vera Simms; and (back) Ray Chiang, Vasilis
Tsourapas, Vernon Newhouse (now at GM), Jeff Everett. |
ME Associate Professors Huei Peng and Anna Stefanopoulou have earned 2004-2005 Outstanding Achievement Awards.
Working as a strong team, the two established the Fuel Cell Control Systems Laboratory in 2001, with support from the National Science Foundation and the U-M Automotive Research Center. The 2.5kW PEM (proton exchange membrane) laboratory is unusual among academic institutions, and the insights gained from experiments have advanced the understanding of PEM fuel cell technology and control both on campus and internationally.
Peng has been working on a three-year project funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Daimler-Chrysler on the water management of fuel cell stacks, including flooding control and detection and membrane humidity management. He is using relative humidity sensors and neutron beam techniques to detect dryness and moisture respectively. The measurements obtained will enable predictive modeling and control strategies for fuel cell stack humidity. Experimental work in a stack will follow.
Working with the automaker is "very significant," said Peng. "Daimler-Chrysler has a clear strategy for fuel cells in vehicles and plans to have them available commercially by 2010. The company has already worked with us on a few vehicle platforms."
Stefanopoulou has been working on the development of controllers, fault detection methodologies and diagnostic algorithms for the regulation of reactant flow and pressure, stack temperature and membrane humidity in fuel cell stacks. The work is funded by the National Science Foundation and leveraged through funding and summer internships from United Technologies Corporation in the area of hydrogen generation from natural gas, she explained.
The ability to validate models and test control algorithms in the Fuel Cell Control Laboratory "fills in the critical gap of experimental verification and availability of public-domain data," Stefanopoulou added. Through equipment acquisition, the team has provided validated control-oriented models for the breathing, cooling and humidification subsystems for a fuel cell stack.
The work of Peng and Stefanopoulou has received considerable attention from professional societies, and the fuel cell models and controllers the two jointly developed over the past three years are already used by many academic and industrial research groups worldwide. The two also recently published the book, Control of Fuel Cell Power Systems: Principles, Modeling, Analysis and Feedback Design (Springer), with former jointly supervised graduate student, Jay Pukrushpan.