PQDIF
file fromat for electrical measurements
Power Quality Data Interchange Format (PQDIF) is a binary file format specified in IEEE Std. 1159.3 that is used to exchange voltage, current, power, and energy measurements between software applications with a focus on the power quality domain.
PQDIF can be utilized by power quality meters, electric meters, desktop software applications, server software, and web servers. Users of PQDIF files include meter manufacturers, electric utility company engineers, and commercial/industrial consumers of electric power.
PQDIF is defined in a "recommended practice" standard maintained by the IEEE PQDIF Working Group, which is sponsored by the Transmission & Distribution Committee of the IEEE Power & Energy Society.
The file format is designed to represent all power quality phenomena identified in IEEE Std 1159, which is a recommended practice on monitoring electric power quality. PQDIF can be used to represent other power related measurement data and is extensible to other data types as well. The recommended file format includes optional compression using zlib to help reduce disk space and transmission times. The utilization of Globally Unique Identifiers (GUID) to represent each element in the file permits the format to be extensible without the need for a central registration authority.
PQDIF allows storage of the following types of measurements: waveforms, time series value logs (rms voltage, rms current, real/reactive/apparent power, total harmonic distortion, harmonics, flicker, etc.), phasors, frequency spectrums, lightning strikes, histograms, cross-tabulations, and magnitude-duration summary tables for voltage sags, voltage swells, interruptions, voltage spikes and other rapid voltage changes.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q96398016. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1159.
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This entry incorporates text from “PQDIF” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.