I am translating an old workshop manual for a Mercedes OM312 engine from German to English. It's fairly easy to do using Google translate (via command line and API) given that I'm moderately familiar with engine terms (and also have a German sister-in-law).
However I'm confused by one abbreviation in the battery maintenance section. It gives 'Specific Gravity' (I know what that means!) and 'Acid Density' for various states of charge. E.g. a 'well charged' battery has an SG of 1.285 and an 'acid density' of '32° Be' while an 'empty' battery has an SG of 1.11 and an 'acid density' of '14° Be'.
It's not important, the battery maintenance stuff is pretty generic and, anyway, the SG values tell one what's needed. I'm just interested in finding out what that 'acid density' abbreviation Be means.
Oh, the German word that translated to 'acid density' is Säuredichte.
So does anyone here know what those units are?
(This is encoded in UTF8 so the character after 32 and 14 is 'degrees' and the second letter of the German word starting with S is an a with an umlaut. Just in case these get lost in the wash for some readers)