by Cone crushers are versatile rock crushing machines that are commonly used in aggregates production, mining, and recycling applications. The design of the cone crusher enables it to serve as a secondary or tertiary crusher and efficiently reduce various types of hard rocks into smaller sizes. Let’s take a deeper look into this powerful crushing machine.
Applications and Uses
Cone crushers handle a variety of hard rock aggregates excellently from granite and basalt to river gravels and iron ores. They provide consistently cubical crush products across a wide range of reduction ratios needed for different construction applications like road bases, concrete aggregates, railroad ballast, and manufacturing sand. The self-cleaning crushing action also helps crush high-abrasion materials such as bauxite and ferrosilicon without significant wear or downtime.
The versatility, high productivity, and adjustable settings make cone crushers suitable for a wide range of industries from mining and quarrying to concrete recycling and ceramics manufacturing. Some common uses of cone crushers include:
– Mining: Cone crushers are used extensively in hard rock mining operations to crush mined ores like copper, gold, and iron into smaller sized material for further processing.
– Aggregates production: The aggregate industry relies heavily on cone crushers to crush basalt, limestone, granite for concrete aggregates, asphalt, and railroad ballast.
– Construction waste recycling: Cone crushers allow concrete, bricks, blocks, and asphalt wastes to be recycled back into construction aggregates.
– Ceramics manufacturing: Clay crushing operations employ cone crushers to crush clays into various particle sizes for making bricks, roofing tiles, and pottery.
– Industrial uses: Cone crushers are preferred for specialty aggregates used for abrasives, filtration, chemical, and refractory industries.
Key Components and Mechanism
Cone crushers consist of a few major components that come together to carry out the crushing process. Let’s take a look at some of these important components:
– Main frame: The heavy-duty fabricated steel frame forms the main rigid structure of the machine that allows easy access inside for maintenance.
– Mantle (cone crushing head): The static rounded crushing head is suspended from main frame and made of wear-resistant manganese or steel mantle underneath which the crushing chamber sits.
– Bowl liner: The replacement liner plates are fitted into the base of the main frame and allow better cavity adjustment and protection of main frame from excessive wear.
– Drive system: The precision-balanced eccentric shaft mounted inside the main frame is powered via V-belts from an electric motor or diesel engine-powered generator set.
– Bowl: Formed by the concave crushing chamber, the spider arm assembly holds the cavity in place and allows it to pivot freely during operation.
– Adjustment ring: Changing the position of adjustment ring enables fast and easy setting of production size by controlling the size of discharge opening underneath the bowl liner.
– Transport system: Chutes, feed hoppers, and conveyors allow material input as well as removal of crushed products from the crushing chamber area.
As the shaft rotates eccentrically inside the cavity, it pushes the feed rock against the concave mantle surface. Continuous compression between the two surfaces causes the rocks to break along their natural lines of weakness until they emerge as shaped aggregates through the discharge opening. Precise setting and adjustment of crushing chamber dimensions makes Cone Crushers a versatile crushing equipment.
Advantages and Limitations
Besides high productivity and cubical aggregate production capabilities, some key advantages of using cone crushers include:
– Adjustable discharge setting for different material sizes
– Self-cleaning action prevents clogging
– Easy maintenance access through top hung design
– Crushes dry and wet materials
– Minimal fines production
– Wear parts are economical and replaceable
However, cone crushers require more vertical headroom than jaw crushers and are slightly less efficient in crushing extremely hard rocks at high reduction ratios. They also need regular greasing and maintenance to sustain performance over long duty cycles.
*Note:
1. Source: Coherent Market Insights, Public sources, Desk research
2. We have leveraged AI tools to mine information and compile it
