Abstract
The management of tar has been at the center of attention for all gasification plants. Removing tar compounds from the producer gas is done by a combination of condensation and filtering processes. Contrary to the gaseous phase, there is not a standardized methodology for extracting the tar compounds that are trapped in the porous of chars. Thus, in this study a novel hydrothermal/ethanothermal extraction method is proposed, which is performed in a hydrothermal autoclave reactor. Our proposed method is compared with two conventional extraction methods, i.e., shaking and ultrasonic extraction for 15 and 30 minutes. Ethanol and water are used as solvents separately but also in mixtures of 50:50 ratio. The characterization of the liquid extracts was done by assessing the pH and the Total Phenolic Content. All samples were measured to have very basic pH values with most values being over 10. Among all the extraction methods, ultrasonic extraction had the most basic pH extracts. In respect to the total phenolic content, for all the different solvents and all the extraction times our proposed method of hydrothermal/ethanothermal extraction was able to extract multiple times the amounts that were extracted by the other two methods.