Impact of dry and saturated limestone towards a jaw crusher energy consumption

Abstract

Crushing as one of the comminution methods is classified as an energy-intensive process. The process is taken to influence mineral liberation from encapsulation of parent rock and expose valuable minerals to improve their recovery. Enhancing the efficiency of energy consumption in comminution can be accomplished by feed material pre-treatment, define the best characteristics and environment of the machine to reduce dissipated energy, manipulate the adjustable parameter of comminution machine. This study is intended to observe the energy consumption of rock crushing process with the variation of rock sample preparation conditions and design in a jaw crusher. It has been shown that saturated rock requires higher energy 1.283 kJ/kg, while dry rock with the same operational parameter only needs 0.926 kJ/kg. The changes in jaw crusher discharge opening size have an impact on crushing energy consumption and its duration time. Jaw crusher energy consumption could decrease 29% and 68% from the minimum opening discharge size to medium and maximum outlet size, respectively. On rock fragmentation, the variation of rock preparation conditions has no significant effect on grain size distribution, yet the larger outlet opening size results in larger fragments of the crushed product. These larger product size of crushing process has a direct effect on jaw crusher energy consumption, where the crushing operation requires lower energy to produce a larger targeted product size.