Synchronous Reluctance Motor Drives: Still a Niche Technology?

The Synchronous Reluctance machine is becoming increasingly popular under the push of new efficiency standards and the high cost of rare-earth permanent magnets. This technology has been known as far as since 1923 and reached kind of technical maturity after the introduction of variable speed drives and digital vector control by the end of 1990s. Although the growing market share will foreseeably continue to grow even faster in the future, to date this technology is still mastered by a relatively small number of companies and academic research groups. This is true both for the machine design, where flux barriers design and torque ripple minimization are the main challenges, and the digital control, which is known to be parameter-dependent and hard to calibrate. The lecture will briefly review the state of the art of Synchronous Reluctance motor drives, from the early years to the most recent advancements in machine design, sensorless control and motor commissioning techniques. Strength and weaknesses, as well as the key controversial aspects that relented the momentum of this technology will be summarized and associated to existing or foreseeable solutions. The open-source platform SyR-e will be presented as an easy-to-use tool for initial machine design and finite-element identification.