Research on Adaptive Thermal Management Scheme for Hydrogen Fuel Cell Combined Heat and Power System

The application of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) Combined Heat and Power (CHP) systems in cold regions presents significant energy-saving potential; however, their dynamic thermal management remains a critical challenge. The cooling loop of the CHP system is characterized by strong nonlinearity, large thermal inertia, and high sensitivity to severe disturbances arising from internal electrical loads and external extreme-cold heat grids conditions. Under such circumstances, traditional controllers often suffer from integral windup and sluggish responses, leading to severe temperature overshoots, increasing risk of 'cold shock,', and excessive parasitic power consumption. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel Adaptive Smith Predictor-based Active Disturbance Rejection Control (Adaptive SP-ADRC) strategy. The Forgetting Factor Recursive Least Squares algorithm is incorporated for online identification, thereby enabling the controller to adapt to physical parameter variations. Meanwhile, a Smith Predictor is introduced to compensate for the large thermal lag, allowing the linear extended state observer to accurately estimate and effectively reject multi-source disturbances. Simulation results under extreme dynamic scenarios demonstrate that, compared to a baseline Fuzzy-PID controller, the proposed Adaptive SP-ADRC reduces the maximum temperature overshoot by 81.5% during electrical load steps and effectively prevents 'cold shock' under sudden external cold impacts.