Mesh (scale) - Sieve Sizing and Conversion Charts

Sieve Sizing and Conversion Charts

Market Grade sieves use thicker wire than other commercial grades, and so they are commonly used for applications where mesh strength (and therefore screen life) is important. Mill Grade sieves use a thinner wire diameter, which provide more open area for a given mesh size. Therefore, Mill Grade sieves are used when throughput is more important than durability. Tensile Bolting Cloth uses very fine wire diameters, and thus provides the highest fraction of open area of all sieve types; it is often used for fine sifting and screen printing.

Further information on equivalent mesh sizes from 5μm to 25.4mm is available. Available sieve sizes are usually regulated by standards. Those in common use are ISO 565:1990 and ISO 3310-1:2000 (international), EN 933-1(European) and ASTM E11:01 (US). EN standards are available with national 'badging' so appear as BS EN, FR EN, DE EN, etc.

Although such information contains long lists of sieve sizes, in practice sieves are normally used in series in which each member sieve is selected to pass particles approximately 1/√2 or 1/2 smaller in size than the previous sieve. For example the series 80mm, 63, 40, 31.5, 20, 16, 14, 10, 8, 6.3, 4, 2.8, 2mm is routinely available in many European countries or the series with the larger steps 63, 31.5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1mm, 500μm, 250, 125, 63μm is commonly used to grade aggregates in the construction industry. Such series are somewhat derived from the principles originally established by Renard and now known as Renard series. Some users replace some of those indicated above with 45, 22.4, 12.5, 11.2 and 5.6mm sieves, mostly because of historical usage of such sizes in their country or industry.