Crusher
Machine that reduces large rocks into smaller pieces for industry.
A crusher is a machine designed to reduce large rocks into smaller rocks, gravel, sand or rock dust. Crushers may be used to reduce the size, or change the form, of waste materials so they can be more easily disposed of or recycled, or to reduce the size of a solid mix of raw materials, so that pieces of different composition can be differentiated. Crushing devices hold material between two parallel or tangent solid surfaces and apply sufficient force to bring the surfaces together to generate enough energy within the material being crushed so that its molecules separate from or change alignment in relation to each other.
- field
- Industrial machinery
- known_for
- Reducing large rocks into smaller fragments for mining, recycling, and material processing
- earliest_form
- Hand-held stones used against a stone anvil
- common_types
- Primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary crushers
Lore & Background
The earliest crushers were hand-held stones, where the weight of the stone provided a boost to muscle power, used against a stone anvil. Querns and mortars are types of these crushing devices. Throughout most of industrial history, the greater part of crushing and mining occurred under muscle power as the application of force concentrated in the tip of the miner's pick or sledge hammer driven drill bit. Before explosives came into widespread use in bulk mining in the mid-nineteenth century, most initial ore crushing and sizing was by hand and hammers at the mine or by water powered trip hammers in small charcoal fired smithies and iron works.
Reader's Guide
Crushers became widely necessary after explosives and early powerful steam shovels produced large chunks of materials that required post-mine face crushing. In the coal industry, crushing and preparation was performed for over a hundred years in coal breakers, massive noisy buildings full of conveyors, belt-powered trip-hammer crushing stages and giant metal grading/sorting grates. Mining operations use crushers commonly classified by the degree to which they fragment the starting material, with primary and secondary crushers handling coarse materials, and tertiary and quaternary crushers reducing ore particles to finer gradations. Each crusher is designed to work with a certain maximum size of raw material, and often delivers its output to a screening machine. Typically, crushing stages are followed by milling stages if the materials need to be further reduced. Crushers are used to reduce particle size enough so that the material can be processed into finer particles in a grinder.
Did You Know?
- The earliest crushers were hand-held stones used against a stone anvil.
- Crushers may be used to reduce the size of waste materials for easier disposal or recycling.
- In mining, crushers are commonly classified as primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary based on the degree of fragmentation.
- A typical processing line at a mine might consist of a crusher followed by a SAG mill followed by a ball mill.
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