What does a feeder breaker do in mining
The feeder breaker is a widely used equipment in the coal and open-pit mining industries, integrating feeding, crushing and conveying functions. It achieves continuous processing of materials through a chain conveyor and crushing rollers, serving as an important connection between the coal mining system and the conveying system.
Its core feature is the “through-flow” of materials in the crushing chamber, which is suitable for large-scale continuous operations and effectively addresses the problem of equipment wear resistance, extending service life and reducing operating costs.
The feeder breaker is composed of tensioning devices, chains and scrapers, conveying boxes, crushing parts, etc.
The working principle of the feeder breaker is that mining materials are unloaded into the hopper by dump trucks, bulldozers or loaders, and the chain conveyor system transports the materials horizontally to the crushing chamber.
When the materials pass through the gap between the teeth of the roller and the bottom plate, they are impacted, compressed and torn, and finally crushed into smaller sizes. The equipment can crush 800 – 1500mm large pieces of material to 200 – 500mm, completing the integrated operations of feeding, crushing and conveying.
Depending on the crushing unit, our company’s feeder breakers are categorized into toothed roll crushers and hammer crushers. Below is a detailed explanation of their working principles in mining applications:
Tooth Roller Crusher: Working Principle
Basic Structure of tooth roller
Toothed Roll: Composed of a rotating toothed roller and a fixed jaw plate, resembling a jaw crusher setup.
Drive System: Electric motors drive the rollers via belts or gears.
Adjustment Mechanism: Controls output particle size by adjusting the gap between rollers or jaw plate position.
Working Principle of tooth roller
The toothed roll crusher breaks ore mainly through shearing, compression, and splitting, with the following steps:
Feeding: Material falls between the toothed rollers (or between roller and jaw plate) from the feed opening.
Tooth Engagement: The rotating roller teeth penetrate the ore gaps, applying shearing force to tear the material.
Simultaneously, compression and splitting between rollers (or between roller and plate) further reduce the size.
Forced Discharge: The crushed material is driven downward by roller rotation and discharged through the bottom gap.
Size Control: Adjusting the roller gap or jaw plate position controls the final particle size.
Advantages of tooth roller crusher
The crushing teeth of the feeder breaker serve as the core component, and their materials and manufacturing processes are highly ingenious: specially formulated alloys are precision-cast and undergo heat treatments such as quenching and tempering, resulting in a strength far exceeding that of ordinary materials. They have excellent wear resistance and impact resistance, and can withstand frequent high-frequency contact with hard materials for a long time, significantly extending their service life.
The assembly process of the crushing teeth employs high-frequency heating technology: through induction heating, the contact surfaces reach the optimal fitting temperature, and after close fitting, a strong connection is formed, ensuring no loosening under high-speed and heavy-load conditions, thereby avoiding assembly failures from the root cause and being durable.
The design of the crushing teeth of the feeder breaker is unique, with a deep helical distribution as the finishing touch: the teeth are arranged in an orderly spiral and have a larger tooth depth, enhancing the grasping and biting capabilities, and enabling rapid processing of large pieces of materials; the helical trajectory guides the materials to be evenly distributed, reducing rebound, improving crushing efficiency and the processing volume per unit time, and ensuring continuous and stable production.
Hammer Crusher: Working Principle
Basic Structure of hammer crusher
Rotor System: Powered by an electric motor, the rotor spins at high speed (20–80 m/s), with hammers swinging in a circular path.
Working Principle of hammer crusher
The hammer crusher breaks material mainly through impact, collision, and grinding, as follows:
Feeding: Material enters the crushing chamber through the feed inlet and is first hit by the high-speed hammers.
Crushing (Impact): The hammers deliver strong kinetic energy to the material, breaking it into smaller pieces and hurling it against crushing plates or chamber walls.
Discharge: Material that meets size requirements exits through the screen plate. Oversized particles are retained and continuously impacted and ground by the hammers.
Advantages of hammer crusher
The modular design of the tooth head is fixed to the crushing hammer by high-strength bolts, enable the targeted and efficient replacement of individual tooth head.
The impact-based hammer crushing method is especially effective for oversized materials common in open-pit mines.
Designed for large particle sizes, hammer crushers offer high wear resistance, large processing capacity, and long service life.
Application Recommendations of Feeder Breaker
In mining operations:
If processing wet coal or clay-type materials, or aiming to avoid over-crushing, such as in pre-sorting coal mines, we recommend the tooth roller crusher.
For high-hardness brittle ores (e.g., limestone for sand production), or applications requiring high reduction ratio and fine crushing, the hammer crusher is more suitable.
Feeder breakers, with their integrated feeding, crushing, and conveying capabilities, play a crucial role in modern mining. Their ability to efficiently process large volumes of material and their specialized wear-resistant designs make them indispensable tools for optimizing production flow and reducing operational costs. You can select either our tooth roller crusher or hammer crusher model based on your specific operational needs.
