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Mo-Shing Chen, a world-renowned energy engineering educator and researcher, died on 1 Might on the age of 91. The IEEE Fellow was a professor on the College of Texas at Arlington for greater than 40 years. He based the college’s Power Techniques Analysis Middle 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 turned one of many nation’s largest and top-rated graduate applications in energy methods 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 methods, decreasing effectivity losses in transmission strains, and voltage stability.Via his work, he solved complicated issues engineers have been going through with energy networks, from small, rural electrical cooperatives to ones that serve massive metropolitan areas together with New York Metropolis’s Consolidated Edison Co.He taught his college students not solely methods to resolve such issues but in addition methods to establish and perceive what induced the troubles.Mentoring the subsequent era of energy engineersBorn 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 Nationwide Taiwan College in Taipei, he joined the Taiwan Energy Co. as an influence engineer in Wulai. There he turned fascinated by tough, real-world issues of energy methods, equivalent 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 USA to take action on the College of Texas at Austin underneath 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 methods together with the Hoover Dam, situated on the Nevada-Arizona border.Clarke and Chen had energetic discussions about their work, and so they had mutual respect for each other. He studied underneath 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 Faculty—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 business, so he based UTA’s Energy Techniques Analysis Middle. It was later renamed the Power Techniques Analysis Middle.He gained international recognition within the energy business by way of his intensive, two-week continuing-education course, Modeling and Evaluation of Trendy Energy Techniques, which he started instructing in 1967. Attendees realized methods to design, function, and stabilize methods. The course turned the facility business’s hub for persevering with training, attended by 1,500 contributors from academia and business. 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 turned 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 yr was awarded one in all UTA’s first Faculty of Engineering Legacy Awards. The glory 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 firms, engineers, contractors, and consultants to current and focus on traits and challenges.He additionally created a distinguished-lecturer sequence at UTA and invited college students, college, and business engineers to campus to take heed to speeches by energy methods engineers together with IEEE Fellow Charles Concordia and IEEE Life Fellow W.F. Tinney. Chen mentioned he was all the time cognizant that the first function of a college was training, so earlier than making any resolution, he requested himself, “How will my college students profit?”By the mid-Nineteen Seventies, the U.S. Nationwide Science Basis persistently ranked UTA as one of many prime energy engineering applications within the nation. Chen mentioned he believed any college member may educate prime college students, who typically want little assist. A professor’s actual service to society, he mentioned, was turning common college students into top-quality graduates who may compete with anybody.A 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 methods— together with a knack for speaking tough ideas clearly, merely, and humorously—made him a well-liked professor. In 1976 he obtained the primary Edison Electrical Institute Energy Engineering Educator Award. Greater than 50 of Chen’s college students and colleagues endorsed him for the honour.Chen based the college’s first worldwide visiting-scholars program in 1968. Via this system, greater than 50 energy methods researchers have spent a yr at UTA, instructing and conducting analysis. Members have come from China, Israel, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Macedonia, Spain, and Russia. Energy engineering analysis for ConEdChen was the principal investigator for greater than 40 analysis initiatives on the Power Techniques Analysis Middle. A lot of them have been supported by Consolidated Edison (ConEd) of New York and the Electrical Energy Analysis Institute, in Washington, D.C.One among his first analysis initiatives concerned creating a pc illustration of an operational energy system with Daniels. Working a pc was costly within the late Nineteen Sixties, and Chen and Daniels’ analysis helped lower knowledge acquisition prices from between US $10,000 and $20,000 to only one cent.With that challenge, Chen shortly demonstrated his analysis worth to the facility business.Within the first challenge Chen led for ConEd, he and his group created a pc illustration of New York Metropolis’s underground electrical energy system. It was one in all Chen’s favourite initiatives, he mentioned, and he loved trying again at his experiences with it.“Earlier than this research, computer systems have been used to characterize balanced methods, not unbalanced underground methods,” he as soon as informed me. “New York Metropolis is basically a distribution system, not a transmission system. ConEd had paid $2 million to a special, very well-known college to do that research, however it couldn’t ship the outcomes after two years. We bid $250,000 and delivered the leads to 9 months.” ConEd’s CEO on the time mentioned, “We requested for a Ford, and also 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-Nineteen Eighties for a bunch of energy firms in Texas. Such methods collect and analyze real-time knowledge from energy methods to watch and management their gear. Chen’s invention proved helpful when he and his group have been modeling electrical hundreds for analyzing energy system stability, ensuing within the discount of blackouts.He printed greater than 100 peer-reviewed papers, most of them in IEEE Transactions on Energy Techniques.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 Skilled Engineers, the American Society of Engineering Schooling, IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Sigma Xi.
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