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A rock crusher is
a machine designed to take large rocks as and reduce them to
smaller rocks, gravel, or rock dust. Rock crushers produce
aggregates and ready-to-process mining ores, as well as rock
fill material for landscaping and erosion control.
Crushing is the
first step in converting shot rock into usable products, by
taking large rocks and reducing them to smaller pieces. Crushing
is sometimes continued until only fines remain. At some
operations, all the crushing is accomplished in one step, by a
primary crusher. At other operations, crushing is done in two or
three steps, with a primary crusher that is followed by a
secondary crusher, and sometimes a tertiary crusher or even a
quaternary crusher.
Raw material, of various sizes, is brought to the primary
crusher by rear-dump haul units, or carried by a wheel front-end
loader. Primary crushing reduces this run-of-mine rock to a more
manageable size.
The jaw
crusher squeezes rock between two surfaces, one of which
opens and closes like a jaw. Rock enters the jaw crusher from
the top. Pieces of rock that are larger than the opening at the
bottom of the jaw lodge between the two metal plates of the jaw.
The opening and closing action of the movable jaw against the
fixed jaw continues to reduce the size of lodged pieces of rock
until the pieces are small enough to fall through the opening at
the bottom of the jaw. It has a very powerful motion.
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