The most common crushing process in ore concentrators is a three-stage closed-circuit crushing process of coarse, medium, and fine crushing plus screening operations, but there are also two open-circuit or closed-circuit crushing processes.

The first stage of the three-stage crushing process is coarse crushing, which generally adopts jaw crusher or gyratory crusher; the second stage is medium crushing, mostly using standard cone crushers; the third stage is fine crushing, which is commonly used for short-head cone crushing machine.

For concentrators with small processing capacity, a double roller crusher can be used in the third stage.
In the two-stage one-closed-circuit crushing process, the last stage mostly uses a medium-sized cone crusher. In a small-scale concentrator or crushing brittle materials, an impact crusher or a hammer crusher can be used.