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Perfect perlite grain size: BHS impact crusher achieves success in Turkey

November 15, 2022

Volcanic minerals don’t necessarily come to mind when one thinks of juice. And yet they play a role in beverage production: especially perlite serves the juice industry as a filter medium. Harborlite Aegean mines this high-performance mineral in Dikili, Turkey. Perfect granulation is ensured by an impact crusher of type PB 0806 from BHS-Sonthofen – a first for this particular material.

When it comes to high-performance minerals, there is no way around Imerys. The world leader produces a wide variety of efficient mineral-based specialties. These include two types of perlite, which Harborlite Aegean, a subsidiary of Imerys, mines in a quarry near the Turkish city of Dikili. The product is used as a filtration medium by the Italian and Spanish juice industries – and poses a particular challenge: for optimum quality, the perlite must have a grain size of 35 millimeters. This requirement can be met with impact crushers, provided that the technology is up to date.

New impact crusher for perlite

In Dikili, Turkey, an old impact crusher therefore presented the company with a hurdle: The machine could no longer achieve the required grain size. The performance of the impact crusher had also deteriorated over the years, urging Harborlite Aegean to look for a more efficient solution. The goal was to effortlessly crush perlite to the desired particle size – with minimal wear and precise machine configuration.

Luckily, a solution was not long in coming, as Harborlite Aegean was familiar with BHS-Sonthofen. In Teutschenthal in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, Imerys relies on a BHS rotor centrifugal crusher of type RSMX to process highly abrasive aluminum oxide. Therefore, the company had no doubt that the crushing technology would also be a suitable replacement for the Turkish perlite crusher. Initial material tests at the BHS Test Center in Sonthofen showed that Harborlite Aegean had made the right choice: runs with two pre-crushed fractions – 0 - 90 mm and 0 - 300 mm – proved that the impact crusher of type PB 0806 achieved the target grain size of 0 - 35 mm. One thing in particular made the machine stand out: it had never been used for this application before, but with a capacity of 50 tons per hour it was the ideal choice for the task at hand.

The Turkish company successfully installed the machine in late December 2021 in Dikili, where it has been ensuring smooth crushing processes since production started in January 2022. The BHS impact crusher proves to be the ideal solution for the fine crushing of perlite in more than one respect: in addition to its maintenance-friendly design, its adjustable gap width offers a key advantage. It helps employees adapt the machine to the material at hand and avoid wear. What’s more, they can also prevent inaccuracies regarding the desired grain size, ensuring consistent product at low maintenance costs.