Making an impact

Doosan excavators are proving efficient carriers for Welsh specialist Hy Impact Breaking Ltd’s four Fractum 200 impact breakers.

Burry Port based Hy Impact has purchased four 52 tonne Doosan DX520LC tracked machines from dealer Mason Brothers since the machines provide a good platform for its large attachments, which are used to recycle steel slag and scrap in the steel industry, crushing reinforced concrete for the demolition industry and for breaking large rocks in the mining and quarrying industry.

Hy Impact Breaking is the only company in the UK to offer the Fractum impact breaker, made by Fractum ApS based at Hedenstad in Denmark, and with four Fractum 200 units in operation, has the largest fleet in the world.

In the steel industry, the Fractum breaker are used for secondary breaking tasks such as recycling slag, moulds, castings and steel scrap, processing skulls and breaking iron and tundish.

Mounted on the Doosan excavators, they can break the material right where it was stored, going from one job on site to the next and provide a much safer, environmentally friendly and cost-effective alternative to the use of drop balls and cranes.

Hy Impact owner Tony Richardson said: “We can provide much more precision and productivity than drop balls with the Fractum 200 breakers which have an impact energy of 200,000 J compared to that of 16,000 J typically for the largest hydraulic breakers.

"We tend to work on pieces of material that weigh from 8-15 tonne and have to break them down into much smaller pieces weighing up to 1 tonne that are suitable for feeding a furnace where they are melted down and recycled.

"Sometimes we have to go even further - for some materials, we have to produce fragments that are the size of a lorry battery for the furnaces.”

The Fractum breakers are also very effective for reducing reinforced concrete waste such as that produced when demolishing bridges and other large structures. In some applications, the Fractum breaker has achieved a throughput capacity of more than 40 m3 of material an hour.

With objects made of concrete, the Fractum units not only break the concrete, they also crush the concrete over a large area, resulting in the concrete and steel being separated, providing obvious advantages for recycling operations.