Developing an accurate model is extremely important to design efficient proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) systems. The current work proposes the Whale Optimization Algorithm
(WOA) for establishing an accurate and reliable PEMFC models. The idea is to increase accuracy
of the extracted model parameters by minimizing error between the experimental and estimated polarization curves. WOA is utilized to mainly mitigate the effect of the local optimum stagnation and
the premature convergence that appear with most of literature methods applied in this regard. The
effectiveness of the WOA in modeling the PEMFC generators is demonstrated by the experiments
using Heliocentris FC50 PEMFC test bench. In contrast to the existing works that characterized the
behavior of the PEMFCs under fixed temperature values, the performance of developed model in
providing accurate results is investigated under different operating conditions. The efficacy of the
WOA is further checked using the data of two PEMFCs available in the literature, namely BCS500W, and Ballard V. Moreover, a comparison is done with some challenging literature techniques
along with the necessary statistical analysis. The final results prove that the WOA has very competitive performance. The proposed WOA has produced the lowest Mean Absolute Error among all
tested methods, with values of 0.0589V, 0.2323V, and 0.2867V for Heliocentris FC 50, BCS, and
Ballard fuel cells, respectively. Besides, the constructed Heliocentris FC 50 model yields highly
accurate results, especially under varying temperature values. Owing to this, it can be stated that the
WOA a powerful modeling tool. Therefore, it is highly recommended to be employed for creating
high-quality PEMFC models.