Quality control of petroleum products by color

Until now, in accordance with All-Union State Standard 2667-52, Soviet petroleum enterprises used the KN51 colorimeter and its photoelectric modificaticn, the F~KN-56, which were designed on the principle of the Duboscq concentration colorimeter. Abroad a simpler method of estimating the color of petroleum products is preferred in which the color of the petroleum products is imitated by an American glass color scale known as the ASTM D-1500. This method and scale were approved in 1968 by the International Organization for Standardization [1] and, hence, in the interest of unifying control and normalizing trade relations, the Ministry of the Petroleum Industry of the USSR decided to provide Soviet enterprises of this type with standard color scales. This gave rise to the problem of reproducing the American scale by using Soviet colored glasses. This problem was assigned to the colorimetric laboratory of the D. I. Mendeleev All-Union Scientific-Research Institute of Metrology (VNIIM).