Amount of substance in use in chemical engineering in the United States is the pound-mole, having the symbol lb-mol. One pound-mole is . When quoting an amount of substance, it is necessary to specify the entity involved, unless there is no risk of ambiguity. One mole of chlorine could refer either to chlorine atoms, as in 58.44 g of sodium chloride, or to chlorine molecules, as in 22.711 liters of chlorine gas at STP. The simplest way to avoid ambiguity is to replace the term "substance" by the name of the entity or to quote the empirical formula. For example: Amount of substance
Defining equation (physics) of measurements to be made when they might appear ambiguous and unclear otherwise. A basic example is mass density. It is not clear how compare how much matter constitutes a variety of substances given only their masses or only their volumes. Given both for each substance, the mass "m" per unit volume "V", or mass density "ρ" provides a meaningful comparison between the substances, since for each, a fixed amount of volume will correspond to an amount of mass depending on the substance. To illustrate this; if two substances A and B have masses "m" and "m" respectively, occupying volumes