We are all familiar with the black top that we see on most roads that we are used to travelling on during our daily coming and goings, travel to work, or for shopping or leisure. This black asphalt top is generally made of petroleum products, such as bitumen that is mixed with stone aggregates to give it the strength to bear the heavy loads of vehicular traffic moving on the road surfaces.
This mix of bitumen and aggregates is created by mixing the two together in a heated condition to produce the asphalt mix. Aggregate can be of a single size or can be a mixture of many different sizes of the stone material. Asphalt mix plants or asphalt batching plants have systems for cold aggregate, vibrating screens, dust collectors, an aggregate drum dryer, an elevator for the hot aggregate, weighing and mixing systems, coal feeder and burners, asphalt storage, and a system for supplying bitumen.
Most of these plants produce the hot mix asphalt in batches in drum mixers and can produce a constant mix of the required asphalt mix. You can also use these plants to use asphalt that has been recycled, while some plants can use a combination of fresh aggregates and bitumen and 25% of recycled asphalt. You will also find some asphalt mixing plants that are mobile and moved from place to place, to work on any stretch of road that is being constructed, or redone. Find more asphalt plant here: https://aimixasphaltplant.com/
Asphalt batching plants are categorized on the their production capacities that is measured in tons/hour. Mobile batching plants will have a capacity of about 80 tons/hour, and are suitable for medium size projects. Large asphalt plants for sale have capacities of over 90 tons/hour and will produce a batch of the mixed asphalt every minute or in lesser time.
In any asphalt mix plant that does batch mixing, aggregates of various sizes are stored in individual bins each of which has a feeder gate that can control the flow of aggregate on to feeders that will carry it to drying drums. Hot bitumen reacts with water and it is necessary to dry the aggregates before they are fed into mixing drums. It is also necessary to remove any dust from aggregates, and the feeders are often coupled with vibrating screens that sift the dust from the aggregate and deposit them in dust collectors.
This dust free aggregate then goes into the drying drums. Aggregates of different sizes are conveyed to drying drums individually and stored separately. The feeder gates on these dried aggregate gates then allow for individually weighing as per any design mix indicated by the user, and this weighed quantity of aggregate is then transferred to the drum mixer where bitumen comes in from heated tanks that raise the bitumen to the required temperature. The quantity of bitumen is also weighed as per the requirements of each batch of bitumen, which will depend on the capacity of the portable asphalt mixing plant.
Mixing is carried out for a fixed time. All operations are controlled through a single panel with many of them being automated. The hot mix asphalt is then discharged into carrier trucks that then convey it to the point of use.