A short- and long-term prognostic associating with remaining useful life estimation for proton exchange membrane fuel cell

• Five multi-step strategies are compared to implement short-term voltage prognostic. • Variable-step procedures are proposed to forecast the long-term degradation trend. • Based on the evolutionary algorithm, the hyper-parameters adjustment is proposed. • Remaining useful life is evaluated under the data-driven prognostics framework. Proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC), as a promising power source, provides a feasible solution for clean and low-carbon energy systems. The durability problem restricts PEMFC application in some scenarios, which can be improved by the prognostic technology indirectly. This paper aims to develop a data-based method to implement the short-term and long-term prognostic simultaneously, and the developed long-term prognostic can be performed without future operation information. First, the short-term prognostics of five multi-step ahead forecasting strategies are proposed and compared based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. Results show that the multi-step input and multi-step output (MIMO) with LSTM strategy has a better performance in the short-term prognostics under the test conditions of the stationary and dynamic current. Then, the hyper-parameters of the prediction model are determined by an evolutionary algorithm. Furthermore, in the long-term prognostics regime, the variable-step long-term method is proposed and rectified by the short-term prognostics. Finally, the developed remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is compared with a model-based extended Kalman filter. The average root mean square error results for the short-term prognostics of two conditions are 0.00532 and 0.00538, respectively. The RUL estimations of two PEMFCs named FC1 and FC2 are given with 95% and 90% confidence intervals, respectively. Consequently, the proposed method can achieve acceptable accuracies in the short-term prognostic, the long-term prognostic, and the RUL prediction.