Experimental Performance of Tar Removal by a Quench Coupled with Adsorption Technology

The effective removal of tar is one of the main obstacles to the large-scale industrialization of biomass gasification process. In this research, a quench coupled with adsorption technology (QCAT) has been developed and patented to ease this barrier, which contained the quench column, the 1st adsorption column and the 2nd adsorption column. For this research, an analysis method of light and medium biomass gas tar was established to determine the light PAH tar (2-4 ring) and light aromatic tar (1 ring) compounds as well as their concentrations; the removal performance and the mechanism of the real tar which produced by the gasification were researched. The results showed that the quench column was used to remove the heavy tar; the 1st adsorption column was able to remove pyridine and the light PAH aromatic tar (2-4 ring) without naphthalene; the 2nd adsorption column was used to remove the light aromatic tar (1 ring) as well as naphthalene. The tar removal rates of the light aromatic tar and light PAH tar were almost 99.9% in the effective time of the experiment. The outlet gas of the 2nd adsorption column reached application requirement.