Atlas Copco breaker provides aggregate on Hyderabad Ring Road

An Atlas Copco MB 1700 hydraulic breaker is breaking rock as aggregates for the Hyderabad Outer Ring Road project by Ramky Infrastructure Ltd.

Indian contractor Ramky Infrastructure Ltd is relying on an Atlas Copco MB 1700 hydraulic breaker to break granite at a quarry site adjacent to the new Hyderabad Outer Ring Road; the rock being used as aggregate for the 22 km stretch of the highway that Ramky is building.

The Outer Ring Road (ORR) project is a 158 km eight-lane highway encircling the city of Hyderabad, in Andhra Pradesh, for the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority. It has been designed to relieve congestion in and around the city and to act as a hub for accessing the national highway network.

Ramky Infrastructure is part of the Ramky Group, which also formed Ramky Elsamex Hyderabad Ring Road Ltd in 2007 to build and operate parts of the ORR on a Build-Operate-Transfer basis.

With 17 years of experience as a civil engineering contractor, Ramky Infrastructure has a policy of reducing the cost of building materials through backward integration.

The company has its own in-house capabilities to produce materials such as mixed concrete, aggregates and asphalt, which also allows it to control the quality of the materials it uses and ensure timely delivery.

For the construction of the 22-km stretch of the ORR Ramky is currently building between Shamshabad and Gachibowli, the contractor has deployed two 200-tonne/hour stone crushers at the site.

Alongside part of the length of the highway are considerable deposits of granite, and the contractor is quarrying this to use as aggregate for the highway.

Mr T Haribabu, head of transportation for Ramky on this section of the ORR, says that controlled blasting is being used to excavate the rock, with small amounts of explosives being used to avoid possible cracking of buildings in nearby residential areas.

"The explosives are breaking the rock into fragments between 1.5 and 1.8 m in size, the boulders then being trucked into the breaking area where the MB 1700 is working in a static position, mounted on an L&T Komatsu PC 200 20-tonne hydraulic excavator," he said.

The MB 1700 is at the top end of Atlas Copco's medium category breaker class, a 1,700 kg hydraulic breaker that works at 160-180 bar and provides an impact frequency of up to 640 bpm, and operates on a flexible combined gas/oil principle. The breaker is designed to work on excavators in the 19-32 tonne range.

On Ramky's section of the ORR, the MB 1700 is being used to break the rock, which is classified as hard granite with substantial quartz content, into pieces of between 500-600 mm. These are then loaded into dumptrucks and conveyed to the site, where they are fed directly into the crushers.

Ramky moved onto the site late in 2009 and is scheduled to complete the section of highway in November 2012.