A Review of Synchronous Reluctance Motor-Drive Advancements

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The topic of the paper belongs to the scopes of the Journal and of the Special Issue. Some comments are given hereafter to improve its quality and presentation.

The email addresses of all authors should be given.

When citing a work, it is not required to include the initial letter of the author’s name. For instance, “A. Rassõlkin et al.” should be “Rassõlkin et al.”.

Line 104 should be revised due to an error when linking to a figure. The same occurs in lines 126, 188, 200, 246, etc.

The titles of axes in figures should be revised to include the corresponding units when applicable, for example Nm for Torque.

The references must be slightly revised according to the template, namely, the titles of the articles should not be between quotation marks, “and” should not be placed before the last author, etc.

Figure 8 is interesting.

A common practice in review papers consists on indicating the sources of information as well as the search terms in order to illustrate the systematic procedure for finding the reviewed works. For instance, if Scopus has been used, it should be mentioned.

An issue appears concerning the relationship between the topic of the manuscript and sustainability. Apart from the first sentence of the Introduction, there is no mention to such relationship; therefore, the authors must comment this aspect at least in the discussion section.

Author Response

The authors would appreciate the relevant comment on the manuscript. We believe that the comments improved the quality of the paper. all the comments were covered and the new version of the manuscript is provided.

Please, find the comments and the responses as follows and let us know if any further changes are required.

With best regards,

The comments and responses.

>>The email addresses of all authors should be given.

The corrections are made, as required.

>>When citing a work, it is not required to include the initial letter of the author’s name. For instance, “A. Rassõlkin et al.” should be “Rassõlkin et al.”.

The mentioned point is considered.

>>Line 104 should be revised due to an error when linking to a figure. The same occurs in lines 126, 188, 200, 246, etc.

Apparently, there was some mismatch with different versions. To fix this all the referencing links were enabled in the final version and the problem was adressed. 

>>The titles of axes in figures should be revised to include the corresponding units when applicable, for example, Nm for Torque.

The figure 5 was corrected and the dimensions were added. please note that in figures 1, and 2 the motors are typical and the values are per unit values. Regarding figure 4 the power factor and saliency do not have dimension. 

>>The references must be slightly revised according to the template, namely, the titles of the articles should not be between quotation marks, “and” should not be placed before the last author, etc.

The formatting of references was changed.

>>A common practice in review papers consists on indicating the sources of information as well as the search terms in order to illustrate the systematic procedure for finding the reviewed works. For instance, if Scopus has been used, it should be mentioned.

The used database was mentioned in the introduction. 

>>An issue appears concerning the relationship between the topic of the manuscript and sustainability. Apart from the first sentence of the Introduction, there is no mention to such relationship; therefore, the authors must comment this aspect at least in the discussion section.

The significance of the work in the aspect of sustainability is discussed in the discussion section.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This review paper compares synchronous reluctance motors with other motor types highlighting their advantages and disadvantages, and proceeds to a discussion of related motor drives with extensive focus on drive control techniques. This paper provides a good overview of the technology and can be particularly interesting to researchers working in the field of motor control.  

The only major recommendation the Reviewer could give is to elaborate more on typical and novel geometries of reluctance motor rotors. As authors note in the paper, rotor geometry mainly determines the performance of said motors. Motor rotor shapes is a research field of its own which too is currently growing and interconnected with the interest to SynRM industrial applications. Hence, adding elaboration on this topic would benefit the readers working in motor design, not only in drive design and drive control. Some relevant results are currently present, e.g. Figure 6 and some data in Table I, but these are insufficient to really benefit machine design researchers.

Please note that on multiple occasions "Error! Reference source not found” message is displayed instead of actual reference number.

Author Response

The authors would appreciate the reviewer for the attempt to review the paper and relevant comments on the manuscript. 

We reviewed the latest advancements in the SynRM drive systems and the goal of this survey was to study the control algorithms and the challenges in this area. To provide a comprehensive study of the SynRM drive, we were convinced to briefly study the design, and the application of SynRM, as well as the opportunities with it in the industry as it is one of the major parts of the system.

As the reviewer mentioned, we provided some design studies to note the significance of the geometry and to provide some references for the performance improvements through motor design.

Nevertheless, the concern of the reviewer is understandable. Since we have published several papers on the design of SynRM which are addressed in the manuscript and we have prepared one comprehensive review paper for reluctance motor design optimization which will be submitted to the same journal, we decided to shortly refer to some research work in design and more deeply focus on the drive aspects in this manuscript.

Please, let us know if any further changes are required in the manuscript.

With regards,