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Mo-Shing Chen, a world-renowned energy engineering educator and researcher, died on 1 May on the age of 91.
The IEEE Fellow was a professor on 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 shortly grew to become one of many nation’s largest and top-rated graduate applications in energy programs engineering.
Chen’s analysis included the modeling {of electrical} hundreds, the impact of voltage management in power financial savings, real-time testing to enhance energy system effectivity, laptop illustration of cogeneration programs, lowering effectivity losses in transmission traces, 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 massive metropolitan areas together with New York City’s Consolidated Edison Co.
He taught his college students not solely methods to clear up such issues but additionally methods to determine and perceive what prompted the troubles.
Mentoring the following era of energy engineers
Born within 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 programs, corresponding to frequent blackouts and sudden spikes of electrical hundreds.
Deciding he needed to pursue grasp’s and doctoral levels in electrical engineering, Chen moved to the United States to take action on the University of Texas at Austin beneath the mentorship of Edith Clarke, an EE professor there. She had invented an early graphing calculator and labored on the design and building of hydroelectric energy programs together with the Hoover Dam, situated on the Nevada-Arizona border.
Clarke and Chen had energetic discussions about their work, they usually had mutual respect for each other. He studied beneath Clarke till she retired in 1957.
Chen earned his grasp’s diploma in 1958 and his Ph.D. in 1962.
He joined UTA—then generally known as Arlington State College—in 1962 as an assistant professor {of electrical} engineering.
As a professor, Chen noticed {that electrical} engineering applications at universities across the nation weren’t assembly the wants of trade, so he based UTA’s Power Systems Research Center. It was later renamed the Energy Systems Research Center.
He gained world recognition within the energy trade by his intensive, two-week continuing-education course, Modeling and Analysis of Modern Power Systems, which he started instructing in 1967. Attendees realized methods to design, function, and stabilize programs. The course grew to become the ability trade’s hub for persevering with schooling, attended by 1,500 individuals from academia and trade. The attendees got here from greater than 750 universities and corporations worldwide. Chen additionally traveled to greater than 40 firms 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 based mostly in Switzerland. Chen went on to mentor greater than 300 graduate college students.
Chen this yr was awarded one in all UTA’s first College of Engineering Legacy Awards. The honor is designed to acknowledge a college 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 at the moment, serves as a discussion board for utility firms, engineers, contractors, and consultants to current and focus on developments and challenges.
He additionally created a distinguished-lecturer sequence at UTA and invited college students, school, and trade engineers to campus to hearken to speeches by energy programs engineers together with IEEE Fellow Charles Concordia and IEEE Life Fellow W.F. Tinney.
Chen stated he was at all times cognizant that the first function of a college was schooling, so earlier than making any resolution, he requested himself, “How will my students benefit?”
By the mid-Seventies, the U.S. National Science Foundation persistently ranked UTA as one of many prime energy engineering applications within the nation.
Chen stated he believed any school member may educate prime 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 may very well be available for discussions.
Chen’s contagious enthusiasm and thorough understanding of energy programs— together with a knack for speaking troublesome ideas clearly, merely, and humorously—made him a well-liked professor. In 1976 he obtained the primary Edison Electric Institute Power Engineering Educator Award. More than 50 of Chen’s college students and colleagues endorsed him for the distinction.
Chen based the college’s first worldwide visiting-scholars program in 1968. Through this system, greater than 50 energy programs researchers have spent a yr at UTA, instructing 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 tasks on 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 tasks concerned creating a pc illustration of an operational energy system with Daniels. Running a pc was costly within the late 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 shortly demonstrated his analysis worth to the ability trade.
In the primary challenge Chen led for ConEd, he and his crew created a pc illustration of New York City’s underground electrical energy system. It was one in all Chen’s favourite tasks, he stated, and he loved wanting again at his experiences with it.
“Before this study, computers were used to represent balanced systems, not unbalanced underground systems,” he as soon as instructed 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 on the time stated, “We asked for a Ford, and you delivered a Cadillac.” It was the start 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 within the mid-Eighties for a bunch of energy firms in Texas. Such programs collect and analyze real-time knowledge from energy programs to watch and management their gear. Chen’s invention proved beneficial when he and his crew had been modeling electrical hundreds for analyzing energy system stability, ensuing within 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.