Design and Implementation of a Diagnostic Device for Fuel Cell Systems Based on an Application Web Server

One of the significant components in the fuel cell power systems is the appropriate monitoring, instrumentation and data acquisition of system operational parameters. The cell temperature influences the efficiency of the low temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cell (LTPEMFC). Additionally, the output power of fuel cell plant must be measured and monitored to enhance the condition of fuel cell plant with respect to efficiency and reliability. At the meanwhile, by employing web servers, accessing to these acquired data through the standard in a real-time web browser has been possible recently. The web server with Atmel processor is defined to be the embedded web server. The embedded web server in this project will be developed to allow operators to monitor the embedded web application serving LTPEMFC in real-time using any standard web browser in a high-performance manner. The embedded web server application is able to correspond to the HTTP requests made by the web browser client. The operator can use a web browser and by typing the specified URL of the website into browser can download the web page in the local area network. This web server does not require dedicated high configuration computer. It is a cheap and smart solution. Firstly, in this paper the proposed stand-alone unit that embodies two (2) Atmel microcontrollers, an Ethernet Controller ENC28J60, hardware components, and sensing circuits is presented. The system design complies with the requirements of a portable fuel cell based application. Furthermore, the simulation and practical results obtained during experimental tests are demonstrated. Finally, this embedded web application is verified in a real-world network environment. The experiment results have demonstrated that the system is able to fulfill canonical network communication with good level of accuracy in terms of the acquired parameters.