When determining particle sizes a wide variety of techniques are used in which sieving may be the most popular. Sieving is a relatively simple technique, despite the fact that of course different instrumental approaches can be used. The main advantages of sieving are the low price of the instrumentation and the fact that different fractions of the original sample can be prepared for further use. On the other hand, sieving is very time consuming and yields results only for a very limited number of particle sizes. Results from sieving typically vary due to several factors: the method of moving the sieve, the period of operation, the number of particles on the sieve and some physical properties such as shape or stickiness of the sample. In addition, the actual size of the
mesh gaps of the sieves can have large variations from the nominal size. All these and some others limit the accuracy and
precision of sieve analysis and are reasons for this technology being widely replaced by light scattering methods, especially
for sizing particles smaller than a few millimetres.

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