An aggregate crusher is a machine designed to grind or pulverize various types of rock into small, relatively uniform pieces. Aggregate crushers are used in mining, quarrying and recycling operations. Several types of crushers can perform this task including jaw crushers, gyratory crushers, impact crusher and cone crushers,. An aggregate crusher can be relatively small, like the mobile units used for reclaiming recycled asphalt, or huge machines that can process thousands of tons of material a day.

Jaw crushers are the aggregate crushers that are most often employed in large mining or quarrying operations. A jaw crusher is designed to crush large pieces of ore or rock between two plates or jaws. One jaw is stationary, and the other is mounted so that the two jaws form a V-shape. The second jaw moves back and forth relative to the first jaw, crushing the material as it moves downward, until the pieces are small enough to fall through the opening at the point of the V. Multiple aggregate crushers of the jaw type are often employed in a series, gradually reducing the particle size.

Gyratory crushers are also used as aggregate crushers. These types of crushers are similar to jaw crushers, but employ a cone shaped hopper with a smaller cone-shaped crushing head that gyrates around the inside of the hopper in an eccentric movement rather than rotating, crushing the source material until the particles are small enough to fall through the opening at the bottom. Cone crushers are very similar to gyratory crushers, but the crushing chamber is generally designed with less steeply sloping sides.

Impact crushers use velocity and mass to process and break down materials. To begin with, feed materials start to reduce as they enter the crusher making contact with hammers or rotating-blow bars inside the rotor. The secondary breakage will occur as the materials are accelerated into either the breaker plates or stationary aprons. Impact crushers are usually used when shape is one of the critical requirements. The feed materials are also not as abrasive. The impact crusher causes a crushing action that breaks the rocks along cleavage planes, which produces an improved product quality when it comes to shape. These product qualities make them the best choice to use in a highly specified concrete aggregate and roadstone application.

Cone crusher is typically used in the secondary and the tertiary roles when the shape of the product is a vital requirement but a proportion of the fines that are produced must also be minimized. Even when the fines produced are reduced by only a couple of percentage points, it often represents a large volume of materials in larger operations, which ultimately increases the company’s profitability and bottom line.