Tar Guideline. A standard method for measurement of tars and particles in biomass producer gases

This paper reports on a Guideline (formerly Protocol) for sampling and analysis of tars from biomass producer gases. This Guideline was developed in a project in the European Fifth Framework Programme with additional partners from Switzerland and North America. In this paper, the final outline of the Guideline is given. This outline has been developed based on R&D work performed by the project partners, which was not performed in the EU project but was co-ordinated from it. Highlights of the R&D work are shown in this paper, which are the finding that formation and subsequent poor separation of tar aerosols are a major cause of poor collection efficiencies when sampling tars. The use of glass frits and the use of a higher temperature in the first impinger bottles avoid this problem of aerosol breakthrough. Tar measurements performed by the Guideline have been compared with tar measurements performed by the SPA method. The two methods basically give the same result for tar compounds ranging from phenol up to pyrene. For larger compounds, a deviation is seen. This paper does not contain the full text of the Guideline. This full text is available on the Internet at www.tarweb.net. Also the report on R&D results can be found on this Web Site.