Massive machines are scrunched down inside working quarries. Seen from the road, assuming there’s an opening in the open pit, there’s at least one mountain of recently excavated aggregate climbing towards the sky. There are also large arrays of equipment encircling the stockpile. There’s a work face, where explosive charges and drilling equipment are breaking slab-like chunks of granite. From here, the workflow accelerates towards the processing stage.
The First Block of the Quarrying Process
Before arriving at the quarry crusher plant, drill holes cut into the rock, then they’re followed by explosive charges. The explosions expert is at work. Alternatively, shearer loaders scrape the rocks. The quarry face breaks down under the attack, at which point the loadout work begins. Filled to capacity, the haulage trucks make their way over to the processing equipment.
A Process Workflow: The Primary Crusher
Piled high on a haulage vehicle, the material load makes a beeline towards the crushing equipment. Now, targeting the first feed aperture, the just excavated rock is delivered to a primary crusher. It’s this stage that sets the pulse for the rest of the crusher plant. Of course, at least up until now, we’re describing a very flat processing model. Let’s add a few dynamic touches to the workflow model.
Equipped With Dynamic Vibratory Equipment
A vibratory feeder heads up the line. The equipment features a high-capacity bucket, plus an equally powerful kilowatt rating. Again, the feeder and primary crusher combine to set the processing pulse. There are jaw crushers next, which require extra kilowatts of pure crushing power, then secondary and tertiary rock pulverizing mechanisms get in on the act. Cut down to size by the crushing jaws and abrasively challenged teeth, the next two stages can take several forms. Typically, secondary crushing decks use cone crushers and impact crushing equipment to further reduce the rock size. Meanwhile positioned between each secondary crusher and its tertiary counterpart, double-deck screening media sieves the coarse quarry aggregate.
Before getting to the process distribution node, or to that aforementioned site stockpile, there are more screening duties to perform. Multiple decks, each fitted with a different aperture size, screen the stony stuff. From several millimetres in aperture diameter to 20mm or even 40mm in size, the branching system decks act as a quarry nexus. Seen from above, pulling back from that central hub, the whole process is exposed. There are transport conveyors linking the separated streams. They terminate at different stockpile mountains, but they only do so after they’ve been divided into those screened channels of sieved rock.