Barcol hardness test the Barcol impressor was developed by Walter Colman as a hand-held, portable means of assessing the hardness of a material during World War II. The United States Army Air Corps required a hand-held method of checking the hardness of rivets due to concerns that aircraft could be sabotaged by replacing normal rivets with soft lead or wooden ones which would fail during flight. The impressor operates when the tip is pressed against the material in question. The hardness of the material determines how far the tip indents and this is transferred by a tension spring and lever to be read
Carbonate hardness [milli[equivalent]s] per litre (meq/L) or ppm. Carbonate hardness expressed in ppm does not necessarily equal carbonate alkalinity expressed in ppm. formula_1 whereas formula_2 However, for water with a pH below 8.5, the CO will be less than 1% of the HCO so carbonate alkalinity will equal carbonate hardness to within an error of less than 1%. In a solution where only CO affects the pH, carbonate hardness can be used to calculate the concentration of dissolved CO in the solution with the formula CO = 3 × KH × 10, where KH is degrees of carbonate hardness and CO is