The goal of this study is to develop a fuel cell model which is capable of characterizing fuel cell steady-state performance as well as dynamic behavior. In this paper a new dynamic model of a 1.2 kW Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) is developed and validated through a series of experiments. The experimental results have been obtained from a Nexa (TM) PEM fuel cell power module under different load conditions. Based on this model, a simulator software package has been developed using the MATLAB (R) and Simulink (R) software and simulation results have been carried out. The proposed model exhibits good agreement with experiment results in steady-state and dynamic performance. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.