Modeling and Analysis of Synchronous Reluctance Machines with Circular Flux Barriers through Conformal Mapping

Synchronous Reluctance Machines (SRM’s) are gaining more and more importance in various fields of application thanks to their known merits like rugged construction, high efficiency, absence of field windings, no or reduced need for permanent magnets. Out of the possible design variants, in this paper SynRel motors with uniform mechanical air-gap and circularly-shaped flux barriers are taken into account and a conformal-mapping approach to their analytical modeling and simulation is proposed. A suitable conformal transformation is introduced to compute the reluctance of each rotor circularly-shaped flux barrier and the result is then used to analytically determine the air-gap flux density distribution and the electromagnetic torque of the machine in arbitrary operating conditions. The accuracy of the methodology proposed is assessed against finite element analysis.