ASTM International

Guide to  Test Methods for the Analysis of Petroleum Products and Lubricants - 2nd Edition
 N MNL44

Annotation

INTRODUCTION

CRUDE OILS, petroleum products and lubricants are highly complex materials and enormous efforts have been spent by the oil companies throughout the world to characterize their chemical and physical properties with a high degree of precision and accuracy. The explosive growth in the availability of modern analytical instrumentation in the last four to five decades has significantly helped in the task of petroleum products analyses. These modern techniques have largely supplanted the classical "wet chemistry" types of analyses, which were used in the first half of the last century [1, 2]. However, there are still a few areas where some specific analyses need these older techniques.

ASTM Committee DO2 Petroleum Products and Lubricants has since the last century led these efforts to develop more reliable and standard test methods to the point that in all corners of the world ASTM DO2 standards are considered as the final arbitrators of the quality of a petroleum related product. Other national and international standardization bodies such as EI (formerly called IP) in U.K., AFNOR in France, DIN in Germany, JIS in Japan, and ISO have also contributed significantly in developing standard test methods for the analyses of petroleum products. However, many of the latter standards are based on the ASTM DO2 standards. There are about 580 ASTM test method standards available that involve a variety of analytical techniques to identify or quantify, or both, about 230 chemical and physical properties of crude oils, gasoline, reformulated gasoline, lubricating oils, additives, transmission fluids, lubricating greases, gear oils, aviation fuels, diesel and heating fuels, petroleum waxes, marine fuels, and other specialty petroleum products. These test methods are annually published in the Annual Book of ASTM Standards [3]. Additional methods continue to be developed in many oil company laboratories either to improve on the existing methods or to enable determination of other properties. Many of such methods remain proprietary to the oil companies.