Commonly used in the quarrying, mining, recycling of demolition waste and chemical industries, jaw crushers are a reasonably difficult application for systems integrators, due to the large inertia of the flywheel, cyclic loading and differences in materials with which customers feed them.
Crushing is an important process in turning rock into a useable product. Rock enters the jaw crusher from the top of the machine and gets compressed between two surfaces – the fixed and moveable jaw. The rock will continue to be crushed until it is small enough to fall through the opening. Ensuring that the size of raw material is appropriately matched to the jaw opening can alleviate blockage incidents. This can be achieved by removing oversize products prior to processing and careful control of the crusher feeder; however, blockages do still occur. To unblock a crusher, a plant must be shut down and the system must first be isolated. However, despite these precautions, a crusher can still be a serious risk to personnel due to the amount of kinetic energy that is released during unblocking.
BTMA wants to develop a system that was highly energy efficient and, crucially, removed operators from the dangerous job of manually removing blocked material from jaw crusher machines.
