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The main shortcomings of the software-based power engineering education are a lack of physical understanding of phenomena and hands-on experience. Existing scaled-down analogous educational power system platforms cannot be widely used for experiments in universities due to the high cost, complicated operation, and huge size. An integrated power distribution system laboratory platform (PDSLP) using modular miniature physical elements is proposed in this paper. The printed circuit board (PCB) and microelectronic technology are proposed to construct each physical element. Furthermore, the constructed physical elements are used to set up an integrated PDSLP based on modular assembly technology. The size of the proposed cost-efficient PDSLP is significantly reduced, and the reliability of the proposed PDSLP can be improved greatly because the signal transmission path is shortened and a number of welding points are reduced. A PDSLP for fault location in neutral non-effectively grounded distribution systems (NGDSs) is selected as a typical experimental scenario and one scaled-down distribution network with three feeders is subsequently implemented and discussed. The measured zero-sequence currents by our proposed PDSLP when a single-phase earth fault occurred can reveal the true features of the fault-generated signals, including steady-state and transient characteristics of zero-sequence currents. They can be readily observed and used for students to design corresponding fault location algorithms. Modular renewable energy sources and other elements can be designed, implemented and integrated into the proposed platform for the laboratory education of the active distribution networks in the future.

Traditional communication technologies based on 2G and 4G cannot meet the requirements of low-power wide-area data transmission in electricity distribution network. Ubiquitous power Internet of things (UPIoT) has thus been proposed by the State Grid of China and it can be used to transmit energy information requested from any location. Narrowband Internet of things (NB-IoT) and LoRa are two promising low-power wide-area communication technologies, which are capable of providing good performance to transmit data collected from the devices installed in the distribution network. In this paper, taking the fault indicator as an example, we combine LoRa and NB-IoT to construct a wireless network to transmit the operation status of fault indicator, which can improve the transmission distance and reduce the operating cost of the system. It adopts a communication mode including a master node and a plurality of child nodes to meet the needs of large-scale information monitoring. Among them, the design of the master node uses NB-IoT and LoRa communication technologies. The design of the child node uses LoRa communication technology and sensor technology. The control chip STM32F103C8T6 is used for data transmission, and the data is finally managed by a centralized means through upper computer software.