This research proposes a new dynamic nonlinear model and its nonlinear control strategy for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) by considering all possible gas pressures and water effects. In this research, in order to prolong the PEMFC stack life, the nonlinear controller based on the proposed model is properly designed by controlling gas pressures to the reference values. Specifically, our proposed dynamic PEMFC model significantly adapts the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system that can directly utilize the feedback linearization for the nonlinear control. All possible water effects are considered for optimal designing of the dynamic PEMFC model. In the control design, gas pressures in the anode and cathode, the relative humidity, as well as the fuel cell voltage are defined as the control objectives to minimize the pressure difference between the anode and cathode, and control the humidity and the fuel cell voltage. Based on these control objectives and the proposed dynamic model information, the details of the proposed control design scheme in the PEMFC model were described in this research. A transient MATLAB/SIMULINK simulation and experimental results were performed and gathered to validate the proposed PEMFC model with the nonlinear controller being approximately average two times more effective in terms of the overshoot suppressing in the pressure control during the transients. According to these results, they show the superiority of the proposed dynamic PEMFC model as a good platform in order to design a nonlinear controller using the feedback linearization for having a better transient performance of the PEMFC compared to the linear controller. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.