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The limitation of global warming to less than 2 °C till the end of the century is regarded as the main challenge of our time. In order to meet COP21 objectives, a clear transition from carbon-based energy sources towards renewable and carbon-free energy carriers is mandatory. Polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) allow an energy-efficient, resource-efficient and emission-free conversion of regenerative produced hydrogen. For these reasons fuel cell technologies emerge in stationary, mobile and logistic applications with acceptable cruising ranges as well as short refueling times. In order to perform applied research in the area of PEMFC systems, a highly integrated fuel cell analysis infrastructure for systems up to 150 kW electric power was developed and established within a cooperative research project by HyCentA Research GmbH and AVL List GmbH in Graz, Austria. A novel open testing facility with hardware in the loop (HiL) capability is presented.

The trend to reduced development times represents a strong motivation for an extended use of dynamical engine test benches, which are used to reproduce driving conditions typically measured in the vehicle. To reproduce the engine load conditions a complex control system is used, which has an inherently different nature in comparison with the vehicle driving conditions and consequently also limitations. As a consequence, the set of possible transients is limited by the actuator limitations and the bandwidth of the control loops. Outside the admissible transients it is necessary to do a trade-off between goals, mainly between the precision of the reproduction of the engine speed and the precision of the load torque tracking. In this paper we discuss how to calculate the admissible set and how to do a trade off. Based on these cognitions we present a feedforward control algorithm which allows best performance transients simulation along the performance limits.