Degradation prediction of PEM water electrolyzer under constant and start-stop loads based on CNN-LSTM

The performance degradation is a crucial factor affecting the commercialization of proton exchange membrane electrolyzer. However, it is difficult to establish a mechanism model incorporating all degradation categories due to their different time and spatial scales. In this paper, the data-driven method is employed to predict the electrolyzer voltage variation over time based on a convolutional neural network-long short term memory (CNN-LSTM) model. First, two datasets including constant operation for 1140 h and start-stop load for 660 h are collected from the durability tests. Second, the data-driven models are trained through the experimental data and the model hyper-parameters are optimized. Finally, the electrolyzer degradation in the next few hundred hours is predicted, and the prediction accuracy is compared with other time-series algorithms. The results show that the model can predict the degradation precisely on both datasets, with the R2 higher than 0.98. Compared to conventional models, the algorithm shows better fitting characteristic to the experimental data, especially as the prediction time increases. For constant and start-stop operations, the electrolyzers degradate by 4.5 % and 2.5 % respectively after 1000 h. The proposed method shows great potential for real-time monitoring in the electrolyzer system.