Crusher

A crusher is a machine designed to reduce large solid material objects into a smaller volume, or smaller pieces. 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 (as in rock ore), so that pieces of different composition can be differentiated. Crushing is the process of transferring a force amplified by mechanical advantage through a material made of molecules that bond together more strongly, and resist deformation more, than those in the material being crushed do. 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 (fracturing), or change alignment in relation to (deformation), each other. 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.

In industry, a crusher is typically a machine which uses a metal surface to break or compress materials. 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. Typically, crushing stages are followed by milling stages if the materials needs 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. A typical circuit at a mine might consist of a crusher followed by a SAG mill followed by a ball mill. In this context, the SAG mill and ball mill are considered grinders rather than crushers.