Rising price of rare earth permanent magnets and increased demand for electrical machines with high efficiency are two major reasons that synchronous reluctance motors have attracted increasing attention in recent years. The outstanding feature of these motors is the complex structure of the rotor which involves a lot of degree of freedom in design. However, many efforts have been made to simplify the design of these machines, but the torque ripple calculation using analytical methods for these machines remains an ongoing challenge. In this thesis, electromagnetic characteristics of the synchronous reluctance motor field are obtained using conformal mapping and magnetic equivalent circuit methods, taking into account both the stator and rotor slots. Specifying the field components, they are used to calculate the torque. The accuracy of the proposed model is examined through finite element analysis. After obtaining the right model for calculating torque, at the initial stage of design, the proposed model is used to determine the location of rotor flux barriers which play a decisive role in the performance of the synchronous reluctance motors. This task is done by using particle swarm optimization algorithms and proposed model. Then the average torque is optimized by considering the saturation effect for the motor. Finally, the optimum motor geometry with the proposed method is compared with one of the commonly used methods in the references. The results indicate further improvement in the torque characteristic using the proposed method. Keywords : Synchronous Reluctance Motor, Design Optimization, Torque Characteristic, Conformal Mapping, Magnetic Equivalent Circuit