Quantifying pressure drop for fluids passing through woven screen meshes has been the subject of numerous investigations. All of them rely on one of two major theories that explain the pressure losses in terms of a conceptualized nature of the flow. This paper attempts to compare the two approaches using a large number of new experimental measurements conducted using water flowing through circular conduits in which equidistant woven meshes are inserted. The work was also compared against a large number of measurements extracted from the open literature and obtained using single gauzes and/or tightly packed gauzes. In contrast to earlier works that focused on narrow ranges of Re and/or accurately predicting their respective experimental measurements, this investigation considers, in total, a set of more than a thousand data points. Two universal correlations, each corresponding to a different theory, were derived using data that spans 60 different screen geometries with fraction open areas ranging between 0.21 and 0.84. These correlations were found to predict the pressure drop over a wide range of Reynolds numbers at an acceptable accuracy. Furthermore, it was found that both theoretical approaches render similar outputs. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.