How to Choose the Right Raw Material Stockyard for a Brick Factory?

In the fired brick and tile production process, raw material preparation is a key upstream operation that determines shaping, drying, and firing quality, while raw material stacking is a critical step for stabilizing material performance and reducing reject rates. As a dedicated enclosed curing facility, the raw material stockyard uses a sealed storage environment with constant temperature and humidity to achieve moisture penetration, particle softening, and property homogenization. It directly affects green brick shaping stability and the finished product qualification rate and is an indispensable auxiliary system in modern brick and tile production lines.

The raw material stockyard is an enclosed storage and curing workshop designed specifically for brick raw materials. Unlike ordinary open-air material sheds, it offers airtight moisture retention, stable temperature, reduced dust, and prevention of moisture loss. In a standard raw material stockyard, the temperature is maintained at 20–30 °C. Its high overall sealing performance effectively prevents surface drying of stockpiles and uneven moisture between the interior and exterior. Some plants use a sunken structure to further improve moisture retention. Combined with automated stacking and reclaiming equipment, it enables layered loading, timed resting, and first-in, first-out standardized processing.

After raw materials are crushed and mixed with water, moisture distribution is uneven and particle stress is unstable. Direct shaping is highly prone to defects such as lamination, cracking, insufficient hardness, drying deformation, and firing explosions. The core purpose of raw material stacking is to improve the overall performance of the raw material. First, it allows moisture to fully penetrate and migrate between particles, making the overall moisture content uniform. Second, it allows the powder to fully absorb water, disperse, soften, and relax, significantly improving raw material plasticity and stabilizing extrusion performance. Third, it homogenizes material composition, reduces batch-to-batch differences, and ensures stable extrusion pressure and dense, uniform green bodies. Fourth, it greatly reduces drying and firing reject rates, saves energy, lowers production costs, and ensures continuous, stable mass production.

At present, mainstream raw material stockyard equipment in domestic brick and tile plants falls into three types: side-type, semi-bridge, and bridge. They differ markedly in structural form, automation level, raw material stacking performance, and investment cost, and are suitable for production lines of different scales.

The side-type multi-bucket excavator is a basic, economical configuration. The equipment runs along a track on one side of the raw material stockyard. It has a simple structure, low cost, and easy maintenance, with low civil construction requirements for the plant building. It is suitable for old raw material stockyard upgrades and small to medium-sized plants with limited budgets. Its disadvantages include limited operating coverage, reclaiming dead zones, mixing of old and new materials, average homogenization, low storage capacity utilization, and a relatively low capacity ceiling. It is only suitable for small brick plants with low capacity, multiple raw materials, and intermittent production.

The semi-bridge multi-bucket excavator is currently the most cost-effective and widely used mainstream type in the industry. It uses a ground track on one side and a cantilever bridge structure on the other. It provides large operating coverage, virtually no dead zones, and increases storage capacity utilization by more than 40% compared with the side type. It enables layered distribution, orderly reclaiming, and first-in, first-out operation, greatly improving the uniformity of raw material moisture and plasticity. The equipment runs stably with moderate energy consumption and fully meets the continuous mass production needs of medium-sized lines. Its only shortcomings are the limited cantilever span, poor adaptability to extra-wide raw material stockyards, and slightly inferior fine homogenization of raw materials for high-end products compared with full-bridge equipment. It is generally suitable for standardized medium-sized brick and tile plants.

The bridge-type fully automated excavator is high-end, top-tier equipment. It uses a gantry-type full bridge on double-sided tracks, spanning the entire raw material stockyard, enabling full coverage and dead-zone-free operation in both longitudinal and transverse directions. It precisely performs transverse spreading and straight reclaiming, as well as layered homogenization. It achieves the most thorough raw material curing and the most stable performance, making it the preferred process for high-precision perforated bricks and premium blocks. The equipment offers a high degree of automation, maximum storage capacity utilization, and extremely stable mass production. Its disadvantages are high equipment cost, stringent civil construction requirements, a long installation period, and a high technical threshold for operation and maintenance. It is only suitable for large, intelligent, high-capacity standardized production plants.

Overall selection principles: for small plants and old plant upgrades, choose the side type; for medium-sized standardized mass-production plants, give priority to the semi-bridge type; for large high-end intelligent production lines, choose the bridge type. Regardless of the type, the raw material stockyard must be sealed and moisture-retaining, and the standard 3–6 day stacking cycle must be strictly controlled to maximize raw material plasticity, stabilize product quality, and reduce production losses.

News Editor: Wendy Luo
Source: Han Lu, Engineer, Brictec Technical Department
Reviewer: Wei Jiangfei
Publisher: Xi'an Brictec Engineering Co., Ltd.
Release Date: September 16, 2026