5 reasons the Nordberg® HP cone crusher is the best choice for heavy-duty crushing

Besides the world-class support network, the reasons for the success of the Nordberg® HP Series™ cone crusher can be broken into three indisputable categories.

Uncompromised performance

Over 30 years ago, Nordberg revolutionized cone crusher design by applying the best design practices, utilizing extensive research and field experience from Symons, Omnicone®, and other cone technologies.  Specifically, the large throw and optimized speed and chamber design introduced unprecedented capacity, product size, and ability to accept large top size. The crusher design was – and continues to be – proven to consistently have higher production, highest power utilization, and highest crushing pressure relative to other cone technologies – and even in comparison against the many knock-off machines on the market.

High speed cone crushing with interparticle, packed bed compression is a complex crushing action that has many factors. Only with the optimized kinematics and chamber geometry can you fully maximize the performance of a cone crusher. Further to kinematics, the HP cone has much higher utilized crushing force to support high reduction ratios and fines generation, when desired. Today’s HP cones remain the benchmark for achieved cone crusher production, yielding the highest capacity and finest product on the market.

High availability

The HP cones have been designed utilizing extensive history and experience with the most knowledgeable engineering teams over the decades. A deep understanding of the stress on components and how to support those loads through proper design and manufacturing processes has led to the HP cone achieving best-in-class reliability.

The proven hydraulic tramp protection system allows for passage of uncrushable material, with ability to pass uncrushable particles that are twice the size of those passed by other technologies such as hydrocones. Additionally, the fully top-service design and short downtime for the most common maintenance activities commonly equates to mechanical availability of an HP cone in the range of 90-95% or higher.

As comparison, the HP cone can complete a crushing liner’s changeout in as little time as two hours when utilizing a spare or rotable head and bowl, only a fraction of the time needed for the same activity with a hydrocone. When you add it up, the reduction in failures and maintenance times has shown to exceed the mechanical availability of other cone crushers on the market by 5% or higher.

Flexibility in operation

A staple of the HP crusher design is the flexibility in operation. There is a full range of HP cone crushers for every operation, starting from 90 kW up to 700 kW. Whether you need a small cone for a 2000 tpd gold mine or a large cone for a 60 ktpd iron mine, there is an HP cone proven for your operation.

Each HP cone is flexible to the specific application. With simple crushing liner changes and adjusting motor sheave sizes, HP can be converted from coarse crushing to a secondary application and to a fine crushing application. This greatly reduces spare parts inventory on site and allows for the machine to be configured for varying applications as the customer needs change.

For more fine-tuned optimization, the utilization of high crushing force and power allows for significant improvements in operation with chamber geometry, speed, and control logic. Simply put, the HP cone has few limitations to tune it to your specific crushing needs, whether it be to maximize throughput and reduce fines generation or to maximize reduction ratio and fines generation.

Proven track record

With these three design pillars in place, the HP cone has earned the reputation as the industry leader in cone crusher installations globally. Over 11,000 HP cones have been delivered and almost 2,000 of these references belong to mining applications where reliability, availability, and trusted performance are paramount. The lessons learned and experience in this vast installed base cannot be replaced by simulation, and the proven track record mitigates risk in a project where a failed crusher selection can limit production and revenue of a plant.

Example case: Pebble crushing

Crushing of critical oversize from primary grinding mills (AG/SAG) has proven to be highly beneficial to a concentrator’s overall throughput and operating costs. This difficult application is a fantastic case study of how the HP cone has maintained the best-in-class designation.

Pebbles are generally hard and wet, with round and smooth profiles. The duty of a pebble crusher is to crush these pebbles as fine as possible, since this reduces the critical size particles that can recirculate through the primary grinding circuit. On top of this, the generation of fine material (~minus ¼” or 6.3 mm) has proven to increase total concentrator throughputs. Achieving this product size with the difficult feed material requires high crushing force, high power utilization up to the rated power, and flexible configurations to optimize the performance for the specific needs of the plant at a given time. Higher concentrator throughput directly affects the profitability of the operation. 

An additional consideration is the availability of the machine to crush the pebbles while the AG/SAG mill is operating. Primary grinding mills have availability of 95% and higher, with long continuous runs over months without a shutdown, while cone crushers have lower availability and more frequent shutdowns for recurring maintenance. The capacity of the primary mill can be reduced by 5-25% when pebbles are recirculated directly to the mill without crushing, and it is easily quantified what the resulting loss in tons milled can be. Very simply put, a 4-5% reduction in uptime of the pebble crushers corresponds to 1% reduction in primary mill throughput when analyzed over one year time. This 1% reduction may seem small, but in overall economics the effect on mine profitability is very significant.

With these significant operation and economic factors in mind, it makes sense that the proven reliability and performance of the HP cone crushers make it the standard for pebble crushing applications. Whether it is an existing operation that is expanding its pebble crushing capabilities, or a greenfield that has a (S)ABC circuit as the chosen design, the HP cone offers long-term performance.