How to calibrate a woven-wire sieve
Woven-wire sieves with inconsistent aperture sizes can make your dry sieve testing results inaccurate, which can affect your product's quality. Yet most users of woven-wire sieves don't check the aperture sizes of new sieves before using them and don't have objective criteria for determining when the sieves are no longer accurate and should be discarded. This article presents some methods for calibrating woven-wire sieves and monitoring their performance during use. Sections discuss the microscopic examination method and a new method for calibrating a woven-wire sieve.
The most common way to determine a material's particle size distribution is dry sieve testing, in which a sample of the material is passed through a nested set of sieves. Several sieve types, in both 3- and 8-inch diameters, are available, including perforated plate sieves for large particles [about 1/2 inch or larger], woven-wire sieves for intermediate particles [about 50 microns to 1/2 inch], and electroformed sieves for small particles [about 1 to 50 microns]. Of these, 8-inch-diameter woven-wire sieves are considered the workhorse of laboratory analysis.