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The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the design issues of permanent magnet machines for the hybrid electric and plug‐in electric vehicles, including railway traction and naval propulsion.

Focus is given on both synchronous permanent magnet and reluctance machines. An overview of the design rules are provided, covering the topics of: fractional‐slot windings, fault‐tolerant configurations, flux‐weakening capability, and torque quality.

The peculiarities of these machines and the advanced design considerations to fit the automotive requirements are analyzed.

The paper includes a wide description of innovative electrical machines for electric vehicles, including not only the traction capability, but also analysis of features as weight reduction, torque ripple reduction, increase of fault tolerance, and so on.

The purpose of the paper is to present a complete design example of an interior permanent magnet integrated starter‐alternator (ISA).

After a preliminary design on the basis of an analytical model, finite element simulations are adopted to refine the design of the machine.

The designed ISA drive is able to satisfy all the requirements of modern cars, where the power of the electrical generators is increasing to deliver the on‐board power demand. The drive exhibits high torque, driving start, and a wide constant power speed range driving generation.

The entire system design is considered in the paper, both the electrical machine and the control strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new finite element technique to simulate variable speed drives.

The induction motor (IM) is simulated according to the adopted control strategy. This allows use of only magnetostatic simulation for both no‐load and under‐load simulations.

The procedure allows the analysis of the performance of the IM drive taking into account iron saturation in all operation points.

The entire system design is considered in the paper, both the electrical machine and the control strategy.

This paper aims to the design and feature investigation of an interior permanent magnet synchronous machine (IPMSM) dedicated to propulsion applications.

The design approach as well as the performance investigation of the studied machine are based on a two‐dimensional finite element analysis. This latter is extended to a comparison study with other rotor topologies.

It has been found that the studied IPMSM offers higher performances than the usual PM machine topologies. This highlights the fact that the rotor design greatly affects the performance of PM machines.

Many continuations of the developed works shall be treated in the future, such as: an optimization of the IPMSM design, an extension of the optimization to the machine‐inverter association, and a validation of the foreseen performance by experiments carried out on a prototype of the IPMSM.

The machine under study could be integrated in electric propulsion applications especially as a wheel‐mounted motor.

The paper treats the design and performance investigation of a new topology of IPM machines. It is a five‐phase concentrated winding synchronous machine with permanent magnet buried in an outer rotor.

The purpose of this paper is to compare different types of electric motor drives for high-efficiency applications: an induction motor (IM) drive, a synchronous reluctance motor drive and a permanent magnet-assisted synchronous reluctance motor drive. An innovative field-oriented analysis technique is applied to estimate the performance of the IM drive. This method of analysis is particularly advantageous in comparing the IM performance to those of synchronous machines.

The comparison among the capabilities of the three electric drives is carried out combining both analytical and finite element methods.

From the analysis, it results that the REL motor exhibits higher torque density than IM, but lower losses since there are no Joule losses in the rotor. On the contrary, the REL motor exhibits a very power factor, which corresponds to a high-volt-ampere ratings of the inverter that supplies the motor itself.

A new analysis technique is adopted to investigate and compare the energy efficiency performance of different machines.

To purpose of this paper is to introduce a procedure to compute the d‐ and q‐axis parameters of the induction motor.

A finite element procedure, based on the d‐ and q‐axis model of the induction motor is adopted.

Such a procedure is well suited to analyse IM with anisotropic rotor, where an intentionally created saliency is introduced in the rotor bar geometry, so as to detect the IM rotor position without sensor.

The proposed procedure allows one to evaluate the sensorless control capability of the IM. It will be useful for both analysis of the IM performance and design of the machine itself.

Velomobiles or bicycles cars are human-powered vehicles, enclosed for improving aerodynamic performance and protection from weather and collisions. The purpose of this paper is to design and develop a three-wheeled velomobile equipped with a hybrid human-electric propulsion system.

The mechanical layout has been developed in order to improve safety, a CAD code has been used for the design and the dynamic performances have been studied by means of specific multi-body codes. The electric propulsion system has been designed both with analytical and FEM methods.

A special three-wheeled tilting vehicle layout equipped with a four-bar linkage connection has been developed. A particular synchronous reluctance machine has been developed, which is very suitable for human-electric hybrid propulsion. A MATLAB code for integrated mechanical and electrical analysis has been developed.

A new kind of light vehicle has been conceived. A new synchronous reluctance machine with high efficiency has been developed. A performance analysis in electric, human and hybrid working modes has been presented, which takes into account the specific features of both the electric motor and the pedaling legs. A prototype of the vehicle has been built.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the design and optimization of permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM) devoted to aeronautic applications.

A design approach as well as a performance investigation, based on two-dimensional finite element analysis of selected electromagnetic and thermal features, are applied to chosen PM synchronous machine topologies which differ by their number of phases.

It has been found that the initial set of geometrical parameters does not fulfill the torque/weight compromise required by a aeronautic applications since it leads to an average temperature rise higher than the authorized limit (class H: 155 K). Therefore, the sizing has been rethought in an attempt to meet the constraints of the considered application.

Several continuations of the developed works shall be treated in the future, such as: (i) the prototyping of the designed machines, (ii) extending the optimization procedure to the whole drive including the motor and the associated static converter, and (iii) the synthesis and implementation of a dedicated control strategy with a suitable emulation of the load.

The studied machines could be integrated in aerospace propulsion systems.

The paper develops a design procedure of PMSM dedicated to aerospace applications where the compromise between torque/weight/temperature represents a crucial design challenge.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of control strategy selection on the power performance of wave energy converters for different ratings of the Power Take‐Off (PTO) system.

The case of a point absorber equipped with an all‐electric PTO is considered. The effect of control techniques and electrical generator design is analyzed from a theoretical standpoint and then verified through integrated hydrodynamic‐electric simulations.

It has been proved that control parameters that maximize the power extraction from the waves can be derived based on the power and torque constraints imposed by the electrical machine.

An optimized and integrated approach to the control strategy selection and generator design for point absorbers has been presented, which maximizes the electric power generation from sea waves under real conditions and represents a good trade‐off for the PTO from both the technical and the economic standpoint.

While the economic literature mostly tackled discrimination looking at labour costs, this work focuses on its relation to labour productivity, arguing that discrimination may worsen the performance of female employees. In this view, it represents a source of allocative inefficiency, which contributes to reducing output.

Female discrimination is both a social and an economic problem. In social terms, consolidated gender stereotypes impose constraints on women’s behaviour, worsening their overall well-being. In economic terms, women face generally worse labour market conditions. Using long-run Italian data spanning from 1861 to 2009, the authors propose a novel measure of female discrimination based on the observed frequency of discriminating epithets. Following social capital theory, the authors distinguish between structural and voluntary discrimination, and use Data Envelopment Analysis for time series data to assess the extent of inefficiency that each component of discrimination induces in the production process.

The results draw the trajectory of female discrimination in Italy and provide evidence in favour of the idea that female discrimination reduces productive efficiency. In particular, the structural component of female discrimination, although less sizeable than the voluntary component, plays a major role, especially in recent years, where more stringent beauty standards fuel looks-based discrimination.

The contribution of this work is twofold. First, based on contributions from social sciences different from economics, it proposes a novel theoretical framework that explores the effect of discriminatory language on labour productivity. Second, it introduces a novel and direct measure of female discrimination at the country level, based on the bidirectional link between language and culture. The indicator is easily understood by policymakers and may be used to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-discrimination policies.