Comparative study between induction motor and Synchronous Reluctance Motor for electrical railway traction applications

The design of Synchronous Reluctance Motor (SynRM) has a lot of variables. There are some difficulties to design proper rotor-flux barrier geometry. It is necessary obtain an optimized geometry to get the satisfactory results of torque ripple, average torque, etc. SynRM is a new motor topology but in electrical railway applications is not working yet. The mature topology in this application is Induction Motor (IM). The main contribution of this paper is to compare both motors and obtain an answer about if we can use SynRM in electrical railway applications replacing IM and whose are advantages and disadvantages of this topology in the application. To compare both topologies we select a traction IM and its performances to design a SynRM that get the same ones. The comparison has been carried out on finite-elements analysis (electromagnetic and thermal analysis) of SynRM.