The chemical industry converts raw materials into a variety of substances, playing an essential role in today's economy. Companies that produce chemicals must adhere to strict standards, not only for regulatory reasons but also because industrial chemistry is a precise operation.
metalscreenmesh supply professional and honest service.
Countless other industries rely on chemical production. The substances are a vital component of producing cleaning products, toys, cosmetics, paint, adhesives, rubber, textiles, clothing, electronics, and food additives, like flavoring and preservatives.
To ensure chemical production is done properly, the industry uses specific equipment, tools, and materials, including industrial metal wire mesh products.
Wire Mesh Screens Used in the Chemical Industry
What is wire mesh used for in chemical production? Metal hardware cloth has a range of purposes in the industry, though most fall under the umbrella of filtration.
Companies often use wire mesh for chemical industrial filtration to separate liquids and gases, strain acids from bases, filter substances at extreme temperatures, remove electrostatic charges, prevent contamination, and treat water. Here's what you should know.
1. Oil and Gas Filtration
Crude oil and natural gas make up a substantial portion of the raw materials the chemical industry converts into products and substances. Metal mesh is used to separate and process these hydrocarbons for chemical production.
2. Acid and Base Filtration
In chemistry, acids and bases are viewed as opposites. As such, they are often combined to neutralize each other, which is how chemical compounds like salt, chlorine, and hydrogen peroxide are produced.
Neutralization requires equal quantities of a base and an acid. Wire mesh materials are used to filter acids from bases (or vice versa) to get the exact amount needed.
3. Low to High Temp Filtration
Stainless steel wire mesh is an exceedingly durable and resistant product, especially when it's galvanized. The material holds up incredibly well in a variety of harsh environments and severe temperatures.
For this reason, it's often used for chemical filtration in applications where compounds go from exceedingly high to exceedingly low temps. Liquids and gasses may have a physical or chemical change when they become extremely hot or cold, but the filter media (stainless steel hardware cloth) will stay the same.
4. Electrostatic Charge Removal
Everything has a positive, negative, or neutral electric charge. Products and substances can develop an excessive positive or negative electric charge, sometimes referred to as an electrostatic charge or static electricity.
This can be a safety issue as well as a chemistry problem. Woven wire mesh is used by the chemical industry to remove electrostatic charges from chemicals and production materials.
5. Contamination Prevention
Like many other markets that use laboratories and factory plants, the chemical industry must be extremely cautious about contamination.
Aside from impacting chemical reactions, it can slow down production and result in profit loss. Stainless steel wire mesh with a small-micron weave is crucial in removing contaminants, refining chemical compounds, and purifying substances.
6. Water Treatment
Speaking of contamination and purification, the chemical industry also uses wire mesh to treat and filter water. H2O is a critical component of many chemistry processes, and it needs to be clean, pure, and untainted. Mesh strainers can be used to extract biological contaminants and chemical impurities from water.
Wire Mesh for Industrial Applications from TWP Inc.
TWP Inc. is one of the world's best wire mesh suppliers. As an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certified company, our products and services adhere to the highest industry standards.
Since , our women-owned business has supported many commercial sectors, including the chemical industry. We're proud to carry high-quality laboratory-grade products for a wide range of applications. You can count on TWP Inc. for stainless steel mesh in virtually any size, shape, weave, and quantity. We supply galvanized hardware cloth, welded screens, and sintered mesh as well.
If you don't see what you're looking for, we can accommodate custom orders. TWP Inc. also offers expert in-house services, including measuring, cleaning, slitting, and laser cutting. Order your industrial wire mesh today or request a quote for a custom order.
Want more news and insight about how your industry utilizes wire mesh? Connect with TWP Inc. on LinkedIn.
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Woven wire mesh is a versatile industrial material produced by interconnecting strands of metal wire made from aluminum, copper, brass, bronze, carbon steel, pregalvanized steel, titanium, or stainless steel. It is available in various styles, depending on material type, wire diameter, and opening size.
Woven wire mesh is manufactured in one of two ways: plain woven or precrimped.
Plain Woven. The wires take their shape and form during the weaving operation. Plain woven wire mesh is used for applications that require small openings, such as window screens.
Precrimped Woven. Individual wires are crimped or shaped before they are woven. Precrimped woven mesh is used to produce weaves with larger openingsup to 8 inches. Because larger openings require greater stability, the wire must be crimped before it is woven. This stabilizes larger-scale weaves by creating a pocket where the wires intersect.
Precrimped woven wire mesh (see Figure 1) is more likely to be specified for metal fabrications made in North America than plain woven wire mesh. As a result, fabricators should know the importance of the crimping process in manufacturing a quality finished product.
Precrimped woven wire mesh serves an amazing array of industrial functions. It provides high functionality when used as an aggregate screen for materials companies and a unique aesthetic when used on the grilles of Rolls-Royce Phantoms. It can withstand extreme temperature conditions in the heat-treating industry and resists corrosion when used in caustic environments. It protects heavy-equipment operators by serving as guard screens and is manufactured for particle-size analysis to serve as test sieve cloth.
In theory, the wire crimping process is simple: Warp and fill wires are prepped by being individually shaped so that they fit together and form tight intersections during the weaving process. But the details, which vary among manufacturers, can make or break mesh in terms of aesthetics and performance, and good fabricators instantly recognize the difference careful crimping makes in mesh quality. The consistency and repeatability provided by a precise crimping process can save fabricators time and money when precrimped wire mesh is specified.
An endless variety of metal compositions can be shaped into wire, and any metal wire can be crimped and woven. Combining the appropriate alloy with the most suitable crimp, produced with the best tooling, ensures successful industrial applications of precrimped wire mesh.
As mentioned previously, certain aspects of the crimping process vary among manufacturers. The following describes one such process.
When a stem of wire arrives at the mesh manufacturer via a large carrier, it is placed onto an electric-assist turntable. The turntable helps ensure uniform crimp spacing as the crimping wheels pull the wire from the carrier at a consistent pace. As it gets pulled through straightening wheels (see Figure 2), the wire is manipulated by the crimper (see Figure 3) to produce an evenly spaced crimp with a desired specific shape.
Crimpers are so essential to wire weaving operations that they often are custom-designed by the mesh manufacturers to allow optimum control over efficiency and quality.
Crimping wheels are placed at an appropriate distance apart to create the crimp depth specified on the job sheet. Manufacturers can position wheels for crimp depth down to a thousandth of an inch. Proper crimp depth is an important variable in determining the success or failure of the weaving process. A crimp that is too deep will result in loose-woven mesh. A crimp that is too shallow will result in mesh that is too tight and very difficult to manipulate.
The more crimping wheels that a manufacturer has available, the greater variety of weaves they can create. Efficient wire mesh manufacturers produce their own crimping wheels, which allow for the constant innovation of different crimps.
At the beginning of the crimping process, hand samples (see Figure 4) are taken to establish that the specified crimp depths meet the applications requirements. Checking hand samples also helps to ensure that quality is maintained, even throughout shift changes and multiple setup jobs.
Sampling checks the depth of the pocket, and recognizing the perfect pocket requires careful attention. Manufacturers also must periodically check the squareness and flatness of the mesh and make sure that its spacingor pitchremains consistent.
The ultimate goal of the crimping process is to lay the groundwork for weaving. The loom simply finishes what the crimper starts, and the weaving process is worthless unless the crimp has been mastered.
Just as fundamental components of the crimping process exist, so do fundamental styles that result from that process. When manufactured to exacting standards, the crimping styles for mesh are the basis for the materials versatility, fostering a variety of weaves that serve a multitude of industrial performance possibilities. Once again, a wider array of crimping wheels (see Figure 5) expands the possibilities for crimping styles. Where an extensive range of tooling is available, the possibilities are endless.
The following crimping styles are building blocks. They can be scaled, customized, or brought together. The engineering flexibility of metal mesh opens up the possibilities for endless patterns and applications, and these crimping styles provide the foundation.
Plain crimp is a simple zigzag style of crimping, in which wires intersect at every available pocket. The smooth woven construction of plain crimp produces a subtle pattern, most common when mesh-to-diameter (MD) ratios are 4-to-1 or less. (The MD ratio is the mesh spacingcenter to centerdivided by the wire diameter.) Plain crimp is suitable for many industrial applications.
Intercrimp is simply a plain crimp with one small difference: Wire intersections occur only at odd-numbered frequencies. The visible depressions between intersections give this crimp the appearance of being in constant zigzag motion. This widespread crimp style is most commonly used with MD ratios of 6-to-1 or greater.
Lock crimp is a more versatile crimp pattern that works well at practically any MD ratio of 4-to-1 or greater. It is characterized by straight sections of wire connected by a well-defined bump at their intersections. Distinct intersections give this crimp a clean aesthetic. Appropriate for many applications, it is a suitable choice for animal confinement, heat treating, aggregate sorting, and fencing.
Flat top crimp is similar to the lock crimp, but all of its crimping is offset to one side of the material. This creates a smooth top surfacewith no high pointsas all wires are woven on a single plane. Its bottom side, however, has crimp bumps approximately twice the height of lock crimp bumps. Flat top was originally created to allow for the smooth flow of materials over the surface and provide a flat face for use as backer screens. Flat top is ideal for aggregate sizing and sorting, agriculture, filtration, and heat-treating applications.
Triple shoot crimp is a specialty crimp style that creates maximum open areas. It consists of relatively long sections of straight wire, connected by groupings of three plain crimp pockets. The resulting material has rectangular openings with a very high aspect ratio. Used primarily for sizing and sorting applications, triple shoot screen is most effective when high flow volumes are required.
Hybrid. Sometimes multiple fundamental crimp styles need to be combined into hybrid crimps to produce quality mesh that satisfies the customers specifications.
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