Assessing health of a fuel stack using fuel cell voltage diagnostics

A method of assessing health of a fuel cell stack comprising:

• collecting operating data from one or more fuel cells of the fuel cell stack,
• determining trust in the collected operating data,
• processing the operating data to identify a bad channel or a weak fuel cell in the fuel cell stack, wherein the bad channel is a fuel cell whose voltage cannot be accurately detected while the weak fuel cell is a fuel cell unable to produce high voltage for tracking state of health of the fuel cell stack,
• determining an age of a fuel cell in the fuel cell stack by an age counter, a controller characterizing parameters that influence fuel cell aging, assessing duty cycle data or real-time data, filtering the duty cycle data or real-time data, weighting the duty cycle data or real-time data, formulating degradation functions, or estimating cumulative degradation of the fuel cell, wherein weighting the duty cycle data or real-time data comprises using a binning strategy based on steady state conditions, dry and wet cycles, or voltage cycles,
• assessing the health of the fuel cell stack, and
• alerting a user about the health of the fuel cell stack.