⚒ Modern quarrying processes and techniques ⚒

⚒ The development of most modern rock quarries involves stripping the overlying soil and weathered rock to get to the hard rock underneath.

⚒ This is then worked in a ‘bench’ system, removing the rock in layers that can be returned to year after year as the quarry is developed.

👉 The quarry becomes deeper with each subsequent bench, with stepped benches reaching up to the original surface.

⚒ With few exceptions, modern quarries rely on drilling and blasting to fragment the rock, which is then loaded onto off-highway trucks or belt conveyors for transport to a processing plant of some sort.

Loading is usually done with wheel loaders or excavators, which combine adequate loading capacity with maneuverability.

👉 This allows them to move from area to area within the quarry, as needed. Where blasting results in the formation of large boulders that are too big for the loading equipment to handle, secondary breaking will be needed, either by drilling and blasting individual boulders or by using excavator-mounted hydraulic hammers to break them.

⚒ The exceptions to drill-and-blast include the production of dimension stone, where the demand is for large pieces of rock rather than fragmented material for further processing.

⚒ The production of dimension stone, which is covered on a separate page, involves carefully splitting large blocks of raw stone away from the quarry face, using wedges or diamond-impregnated wire saws. Another exception is where the rock is soft enough to be ripped, using a large dozer or a ripper tine mounted on a hydraulic excavator, with the dozer then being used to push the broken rock onto a hopper or mobile crusher which feeds a belt conveyor system.

⚒ 👉 Quarry design depends on a number of factors including the pre-existing topography, intended output, infrastructure, and environmental footprint.