Mo-Shing Chen, a world-renowned energy engineering educator and researcher, died on 1 May at the age of 91.
The IEEE Fellow was a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington for greater than 40 years. He based the college’s Energy Systems Research Center in 1968 and served as its director till he retired in 2003.
Chen created UTA’s first Ph.D. program in electrical engineering in 1969, and it rapidly grew to become one of the nation’s largest and top-rated graduate packages in energy techniques engineering.
Chen’s analysis included the modeling of electrical masses, the impact of voltage management in vitality financial savings, real-time testing to enhance energy system effectivity, laptop illustration of cogeneration techniques, lowering effectivity losses in transmission strains, and voltage stability.
Through his work, he solved advanced issues engineers had been going through with energy networks, from small, rural electrical cooperatives to ones that serve giant metropolitan areas together with New York City’s Consolidated Edison Co.
He taught his college students not solely the right way to remedy such issues but in addition the right way to establish and perceive what triggered the troubles.
Mentoring the subsequent technology of energy engineers
Born in the village of Wuxing in China, Chen and his household moved to Taiwan in 1949 when he was an adolescent. After Chen earned a bachelor’s diploma in electrical engineering in 1954 from National Taiwan University in Taipei, he joined the Taiwan Power Co. as an influence engineer in Wulai. There he grew to become fascinated by troublesome, real-world issues of energy techniques, equivalent to frequent blackouts and sudden spikes of electrical masses.
Deciding he wished to pursue grasp’s and doctoral levels in electrical engineering, Chen moved to the United States to take action at the University of Texas at Austin below the mentorship of Edith Clarke, an EE professor there. She had invented an early graphing calculator and labored on the design and development of hydroelectric energy techniques together with the Hoover Dam, situated on the Nevada-Arizona border.
Clarke and Chen had full of life discussions about their work, they usually had mutual respect for each other. He studied below Clarke till she retired in 1957.
Chen earned his grasp’s diploma in 1958 and his Ph.D. in 1962.
He joined UTA—then often known as Arlington State College—in 1962 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering.
As a professor, Chen noticed {that electrical} engineering packages at universities round the nation weren’t assembly the wants of business, so he based UTA’s Power Systems Research Center. It was later renamed the Energy Systems Research Center.
He gained international recognition in the energy business by means of his intensive, two-week continuing-education course, Modeling and Analysis of Modern Power Systems, which he started educating in 1967. Attendees discovered the right way to design, function, and stabilize techniques. The course grew to become the energy business’s hub for persevering with schooling, attended by 1,500 members from academia and business. The attendees got here from greater than 750 universities and firms worldwide. Chen additionally traveled to greater than 40 corporations and universities to show the course.
He mentored UTA’s first Ph.D. graduate, Howard Daniels, who grew to become an IEEE life member and vice chairman of a multinational energy firm primarily based in Switzerland. Chen went on to mentor greater than 300 graduate college students.
Chen this 12 months was awarded one of UTA’s first College of Engineering Legacy Awards. The honor is designed to acknowledge a school member’s career-long efficiency and dedication to the college.
In 1968 he based the Transmission and Substation Design and Operation Symposium. The occasion, nonetheless held immediately, serves as a discussion board for utility corporations, engineers, contractors, and consultants to current and talk about tendencies and challenges.
He additionally created a distinguished-lecturer collection at UTA and invited college students, college, and business engineers to campus to take heed to speeches by energy techniques engineers together with IEEE Fellow Charles Concordia and IEEE Life Fellow W.F. Tinney.
Chen stated he was at all times cognizant that the main objective of a college was schooling, so earlier than making any choice, he requested himself, “How will my students benefit?”
By the mid-Nineteen Seventies, the U.S. National Science Foundation constantly ranked UTA as one of the high energy engineering packages in the nation.
Chen stated he believed any college member may educate high college students, who typically want little assist. A professor’s actual service to society, he stated, was turning common college students into top-quality graduates who may compete with anybody.
Part of that course of was recruiting, motivating, and mentoring college students. Chen insisted that his graduate college students have an workplace close to his so he might be available for discussions.
Chen’s contagious enthusiasm and thorough understanding of energy techniques— together with a knack for speaking troublesome ideas clearly, merely, and humorously—made him a preferred professor. In 1976 he acquired the first Edison Electric Institute Power Engineering Educator Award. More than 50 of Chen’s college students and colleagues endorsed him for the honor.
Chen based the college’s first worldwide visiting-scholars program in 1968. Through the program, greater than 50 energy techniques researchers have spent a 12 months at UTA, educating and conducting analysis. Participants have come from China, Israel, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Macedonia, Spain, and Russia.
Power engineering analysis for ConEd
Chen was the principal investigator for greater than 40 analysis initiatives at the Energy Systems Research Center. Many of them had been supported by Consolidated Edison (ConEd) of New York and the Electric Power Research Institute, in Washington, D.C.
One of his first analysis initiatives concerned creating a pc illustration of an operational energy system with Daniels. Running a pc was costly in the late Nineteen Sixties, and Chen and Daniels’ analysis helped lower knowledge acquisition prices from between US $10,000 and $20,000 to just one cent.
With that challenge, Chen rapidly demonstrated his analysis worth to the energy business.
In the first challenge Chen led for ConEd, he and his staff created a pc illustration of New York City’s underground electrical energy system. It was one of Chen’s favourite initiatives, he stated, and he loved trying again at his experiences with it.
“Before this study, computers were used to represent balanced systems, not unbalanced underground systems,” he as soon as advised me. “New York City is fundamentally a distribution system, not a transmission system. ConEd had paid $2 million to a different, very famous university to do this study, but it couldn’t deliver the results after two years. We bid $250,000 and delivered the results in nine months.”
ConEd’s CEO at the time stated, “We asked for a Ford, and you delivered a Cadillac.” It was the starting of a virtually 30-year relationship between Chen and the utility firm.
Chen and his colleagues designed and constructed a small supervisory management and knowledge acquisition system in the mid-Nineteen Eighties for a bunch of energy corporations in Texas. Such techniques collect and analyze real-time knowledge from energy techniques to watch and management their tools. Chen’s invention proved priceless when he and his staff had been modeling electrical masses for analyzing energy system stability, leading to the discount of blackouts.
He revealed greater than 100 peer-reviewed papers, most of them in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems.
His awards included the 1984 IEEE Centennial Medal, an honorary professorship by eight universities in China and Taiwan, and an honorary EE doctorate in 1997 from the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, in Mexico.
He was a member of the Texas Society of Professional Engineers, the American Society of Engineering Education, IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Sigma Xi.