Developing an accurate model is important to design and simulation of the fuel cell systems. In this work, we propose a cuckoo search algorithm with explosion operator (CS-EO) to estimate the model parameters of the proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). In CS-EO, the adaptive strategy of step size is adopted to enhance search ability. And the explosion operator is employed to avoid being trapped into local optima. Numerical experiments conduct on some benchmark functions indicate that CS-EO has better performance both in convergence and accuracy. The CS-EO is also applied to estimate the PEMFC model parameters and the satisfactory results reveal its effectiveness. (C) 2018 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.