Rock crushing

A crusher is a machine designed to reduce large rocks into smaller rocks, gravel, or rock dust.

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, crushers are machines which use a metal surface to break or compress materials into small fractional chunks or denser masses. Throughout most of industrial history, the greater part of crushing and mining part of the process occurred under muscle power as the application of force concentrated in the tip of the miners pick or sledge hammer driven drill bit. Before explosives came into widespread use in bulk mining in the mid-nineteenth century, most initial ore crushing and sizing was by hand and hammers at the mine or by water powered trip hammers in the small charcoal fired smithies and iron works typical of the Renaissance through the early-to-middle industrial revolution. It was only after explosives, and later early powerful steam shovels produced large chunks of materials, chunks originally reduced by hammering in the mine before being loaded into sacks for a trip to the surface, chunks that were eventually also to lead to rails and mine railways transporting bulk aggregations that post-mine face crushing became widely necessary. The earliest of these were in the foundries, but as coal took hold the larger operations became the coal breakers that fueled industrial growth from the first decade of the 1600s to the replacement of breakers in the 1970s through the fuel needs of the present day. The gradual coming of that era and displacement of the cottage industry based economies was itself accelerated first by the utility of wrought and cast iron as a desired materials giving impetus to larger operations, then in the late-sixteenth century by the increasing scarcity of wood lands for charcoal production to make the newfangled window glass material that had become—along with the chimney— 'all the rage'  among the growing middle-class and affluence of the sixteenth-and-seventeenth centuries;and as always, the charcoal needed to smelt metals, especially to produce ever larger amounts of brass and bronze,pig iron, cast iron and wrought iron demanded by the new consumer classes. Other metallurgical developments such as silver and gold mining mirrored the practices and developments of the bulk material handling methods and technologies feeding the burgeoning appetite for more and more iron and glass, both of which were rare in personal possessions until the 1700s.

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