Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies

Both the pyrolysis and gasification processes produce particulate matter that retain in the bio-oil and syngas, respectively. Particulate matter would be mainly biochar that can interfere with the combustion or catalytic conversion of either syngas or bio-oil. It is also thought to catalyze the polymerization of bio-oil, which increases the viscosity of bio-oil over time. High temperature bag houses, ceramic candle filters, and moving bed granular filters have been variously suggested for syngas cleaning at elevated temperatures.  Also high temperature filtration of bio-oil vapors has been suggested by the national Renewable Energy Laboratory although there remain technical challenges to this approach .

Much of the work has been hampered by the absence of real-time instrumentation to measure filtration efficiency. Previous work has employed isokinetic sampling combined with time consuming gravimetric analytical methods. Several hours can be consumed in collecting a single data point. 

This project has two main goals;

-The first is to utilize an existing laser probe equipment to measure the concentration of particulate material in the hot gas leaving the pyrolyzer and gasifier.

-The second objective is to use the laser particle counter to assess the performance of two kinds of hot gas impaction filters: a high temperature fabric filter and a moving bed granular filter.