Woven wire for sieves, filters and support material has been made for centuries. During the past century the manufacturing process has seen enormous improvements, not only in terms of efficiency but also in the area of quality and variety of applications: over the years increasingly automated and faster machines have been developed, there has been a vast increase in the wire qualities available and special products have been developed through partnership between weaving mills and users.
There are relatively few traditional wire-weaving mills left nowadays—partly as a result of the development of synthetic fibre products—but in most cases these have become highly specialized companies, involved with such things as exotic materials, architecture, watermarks, conveyor belts, polymer filters, mud screens, screen-printing, woven wire products etc. Dinxperlo Wire Weaving Co. has been a household word for over eighty years and has kept up with developments, in particular producing high-quality wire mesh and cloth.
A special department at Dinxperlo is the one where screen-printing mesh is produced. This is a product that needs to meet extremely high technical standards: it must be free from colour gradations, dirt, creases, wrinkles, lines, slits, faults and variations in thickness. Besides weaving the mesh, Dinxperlo provides a stretching service which will have your screens professionally fitted with the best screen-printing mesh in no time.
Filtration, strengthening, aesthetic and other applications require weaves such plain Dutch and multiplex weave, but these are not used for screen-printing mesh as they have no advantages there. In most cases, then, screen-printing mesh is plain weave. Screen-printing mesh is required in calendered types for certain applications: this means that the mesh has been rolled to reduce the thickness (retaining the same wire diameter and mesh size) and thus the volume of ink.
Woven wire is normally characterized by wire diameter (d1) and aperture size (s1). The material, weave and weave regularity are also important. Stainless steel is always used for metal screen-printing mesh, which has to meet high standards of regularity and reproducibility of quality.
The theoretical ink volume of a particular type of mesh is determined by the thickness of the mesh less the volume of the wire. The volume (Vo) of the mesh is shown here schematically. The ratio between these volumes is an important parameter when it comes to achieving optimum printing results.
INSPECTED QUALITY
Small variations in wire diameter, mesh size, tensile strength and mesh thickness, combined with the various parameters in the screen printing process, can have a major effect on quality and yield. You need to be sure that you always have the same high-quality mesh available to you, which can be used at high tension to achieve the optimum (fast) squeegee stroke.
In order to ensure that the mesh comes up to the required standard—despite the high degree of inspection before and during manufacture—sophisticated equipment is needed to detect any tiny variations and achieve consistent high quality through statistical feedback.
Through this web site we should like to give you some idea of the possibilities in just one of our specialist areas, viz. screen-printing mesh.
This table gives you an idea of Dinxperlo’s common specifications (normally available from stock).
