Market-appropriate, multifarious facing-brick production: The preparation plant of the soft-mud brick factory in Measham

»1 Ground plan of the feeding, material preparation and longitudinal souring plant

»2 Simplified material flow sheet of a given raw-material composition

»3 The BKSS 1508b box feeder with a discharge width of 1500 mm

»4 WMH 818a roller crusher with hydraulic drive

»5 Main preparation plant comprising an HMIQ 2170c Quadro pan mill and two roller trains with Beta sliding-bearing roller mills, type-WF 10120e, serving as precrushing units

»6 Two WF 1050e Beta roller mills serving as sizing mills, and type-MDG 1215a double-shaft screening mixers with stationary, hand-slewing screens

»7 Fully automated sump house with longitudinal dredging excavator as material store and buffer

»8 BRSH 19c clay shredder fitted with frequency-controlled scraping arms for precision proportioning

In May 2009, after a planning, construction and installation period of roughly one and a half year, the GB-based group Hanson Building Products commissioned their new soft-mud facing brick production plant in Measham. It is the youngest new brickworks in all of Great Britain and, considering the ongoing global economic crisis, can be expected to remain so for quite some time. All the more important, then, that its market-appropriate product array and cost efficiently fabricated, high-quality products are set to exploit every market opportunity that comes along. This contribution describes the basic concept, the products, the raw materials and the Händle-engineered preparation plant of the new facing-brick manufacturing facility situated on a brownfield site just outside of Measham.

1 Company and plant concept

GB-based Hanson Building Products is part of the Geman Heidelberg Cement Group. Hanson operates its quarrying and building products businesses across the world but produces clay bricks in the UK and USA where it has a strong market position.

The plant at Measham was part of a project to build several new ‘super-factories’ to replace the many smaller, old and less efficient plants with large scale state of the art, highly automated plants able to manufacture high quality bricks.

For Hanson – as a customer-oriented enterprise – the basic prerequisites for the new plant...