Silica Sand Mining Process Flow Chart

Even though there's a excellent quantity of variability in how sand is mined, this section describes a typical sand mine and sand processing plant. The overview from the sand mining process provided below is descriptive of a more typical dry mine even though in both instances numerous in the identical further processing steps would take location with both mining strategies.

Silica Sand Overburden Removal/Excavation

Prior to any actual mining becoming done at a web site, it really is necessary to eliminate overburden from the leading in the sand formation. Overburden is topsoil or subsoil that's primarily composed of silt, loam, clay, or combinations of the 3. Overburden thickness is very variable, but as has been stated above, a desirable trait of Wisconsin's frac sand formations is that they are close for the surface, meaning there is certainly little overburden to remove. Removal is performed by scrapers or tracked excavators and off-road haul trucks. The overburden is usually hauled to the perimeter in the mine website and piled into berms. Topsoil is kept separate and utilized on leading of the berms when they have reached their final elevation. Finally the berms are seeded and mulched. The berms have multiple purposes; they provide storage for overburden until the mine is reclaimed, they supply a visual barrier between the active mine and roads or adjoining properties, they screen light pollution should the mine be operated after dark, and they act as a noise barrier.

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When the overburden has been removed, the sand is excavated. Depending upon the geological formation, blasting might be used to make the sand containing material more amenable to excavation. Excavation is normally performed by large tracked excavators or rubber-tired front finish loaders. The excavated material could be taken straight towards the washing process, stockpiled on site for later processing, trucked to a processing facility or trucked to a rail load-out exactly where it will be taken by rail to a processing plant. Stockpiles might be formed by conveyors, or trucks could deposit the sand in a pile along with a dozer or rubber-tired loader will push the sand, gradually developing a sizable pile that the trucks drive on leading of to deposit more sand.

Silica Sand Blasting

In circumstances where the sand-bearing geological formation is tightly cemented it may be required to use blasting to make the sand a lot more amenable to removal. Blasting practices can outcome in noise, vibration, and fugitive dust emissions. Blasting at mines will differ with website particular geology. It could be conducted as often as every day or only as soon as every few months.

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If the formation is of such a nature that it demands blasting, it really is likely that the material will then need to be crushed to minimize the size from the particles for later handling. After blasting, the sand is inside a mix of rocks and boulders on the floor of the mine. This material is often referred to as shot rock.

A mobile crushing unit(mobile crushing plant) is brought for the mine and is placed close for the blast area to be able to minimize the distance the shot rock needs to be hauled to become loaded into the crusher. Bigger mines may have a permanently placed crushing plant. In these cases the shot rock is either conveyed or hauled to the crusher by haul trucks loaded by front finish loaders or big excavators. 9 Crushing plants are typically composed of a main crushing unit (chinese jaw crusher manufacturers) and a secondary crusher (cone crusher for sale) with a screen plant. Crushing plants are powered by either a sizable diesel engine, or by a generator. The shot rock is picked up by front end loaders from the blast area and carried for the main crusher. The main crusher breaks the shot rock into what's referred to as breaker run.

Breaker run is conveyed to the secondary crusher where it is additional broken down. The resulting material is fed to a screen plant where it's sorted by size. Smaller particles of a targeted size are carried away to stockpiles. Bigger particles are recycled inside the plant for the secondary crusher and screens until they have reached the desired size.