In the past couple of weeks I’ve received several questions about measurement units and how they differ from one another. Have you ever tried to keep bar, mbar, atm, Kpa, %Vbar, %, torr, ppm and ppb straight? If you’re listening to someone in speed mode (I plead guilty) it can be a challenge to follow.
So let’s start by looking at the way different units present at 1 bar, the unit of pressure sometimes also referred to as “atmosphere.”
1 bar =
- 1000 mbar
- 750.1 Torr
- 750.1 mm Hg
- 29.53 inches Hg
- 0.987 Atm
- 14.50 psia
- 100 kPa
As a brewer you probably won’t see much of units like Torr or mm of mercury (mm Hg), but there’s a unit called %Vbar or ppmVbar that may be helpful. I use them a lot and they can easily be interchanged with percent, but there is a specific distinction in that it is tied to atmospheric pressure and thus stands for “Percent Volume Barometric and “PPM Volume Barometric”. “
So why use Vbar instead of just percent? If you’re at a high elevation and want to specify that that the percent of the gas you are measuring is being measured at atmospheric pressure, then Vbar is your unit. For example, Denver Colorado is roughly 5280 feet. At that elevation there are about 15 percent fewer atmospheric gas molecules — 855 mbar – versus the 1013 mbar you would find at sea level in San Francisco. The Vbar units confirm that the instrument is at atmospheric pressure while the sample is being measured.
This table compares different gas percentages using some of the most common units you may encounter:
Unit |
mbar |
Bar |
Atm |
Percent (absolute)
|
%Vbar |
PPM |
100% gas (at sea level) |
1013 |
1.013 |
1.000 |
100.0 |
100.0 |
1,000,000
|
100% gas (atmospheric at 5280 feet) |
855 |
0.855 |
0.844 |
84.4% |
100 |
1,000,000
|
1.000 % gas |
10 |
0.010 |
0.010 |
1 |
1 |
10,000 |
0.100 % gas |
1 |
0.001 |
0.001 |
0.1 |
0.1 |
1,000 |
0.010 % gas |
0.1 |
0.0001 |
0.0001 |
0.01 |
0.01 |
100 |
0.001% gas |
0.01 |
0.00001 |
0.00001 |
0.001 |
0.001 |
10 |
0.0001 % gas |
0.001 |
0.000001 |
0.000001 |
0.0001 |
0.0001 |
1 |
My final thought is to understand the units available to you. If you are purging down a tank with CO2 and want a specific percentage of CO2 purity, use the units that will equate back to what could dissolve in your beer if the purge didn’t exhaust all of the contaminating gas in the tank.