An asphalt plant that feeds aggregate continuously from cold feed bins into a long rotating drum, where a burner dries and heats it before binder and RAP are added farther along the drum or in a separate mixer. Output streams nonstop up a drag slat conveyor to storage silos, commonly at 200 to 600 tons per hour. Counterflow drums, where aggregate moves toward the flame, dominate because they keep binder away from the burner's hot gases.
Drum plant's back up, they had a flight break loose in the dryer, first trucks out in forty minutes.
Also heard as
- drum mix plant
- drum mixer
- continuous plant
Do not mix it up with
- Batch plant: A batch plant weighs and mixes each batch separately in a pugmill instead of running a continuous stream.
Related terms
Batch plant
An asphalt plant that weighs and mixes each load in separate batches in a pugmill.
Baghouse
The fabric-filter dust collector that cleans the exhaust from an asphalt plant's dryer.
Hot plant
Field slang for an asphalt production plant, of either drum or batch type.
RAP
Reclaimed asphalt pavement: old asphalt milled or crushed and fed back into new mix as aggregate and binder.