Optimal fractional model identification of the polymer membrane fuel cells based on a new developed version of Water Strider Algorithm

The present study proposed an optimized fractional-order model for a Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFC) to use in forecasting its behavior and examining unknown parameters affecting the cell efficiency. Here a new metaheuristic called the developed Water Strider Algorithm (dWSA) is suggested to define the unidentified variables of the considered PEMFC model. The idea is to optimal modeling of the parameters by minimizing the Sum of Squared Error (SSE) between the actual and the predicted terminal voltages of the PEMFC. To give a fair verification, a comparison of the results for the suggested model is established with the integer-based model and some other fractional-based optimized methods. Final results specified that incrementing of the H2 flow made fractional models terminal voltage of the PEMFC stack to be changed slowly than the integer-order model. Consequently, more similar results to the actual operating characteristics are achieved for the PEMFC stack by the proposed method. Also, the results indicate that using the suggested model gives the optimum results compared with other fractional-based models to model the dynamic features of the PEMFC stack that is efficient to assess the association between the hydrogen flow and the terminal voltage.