Advanced, coal-based, power plants, such as IGCC and Advanced-PFBC, are currently nearing commercial demonstration. These power plant technologies require hot gas filtration as part of their gas cleaning trains. Ceramic barrier filters are the major filter candidates being developed for these hot gas cleaning applications. While ceramic barrier filters achieve high levels of particle removal, there are concerns for their reliability and operability in these applications. An alternative hot gas filtration technology is the moving granular bed filter. These systems are at a lower state of development than ceramic barrier filters, and the current, moving granular-bed filter technologies are relatively large, complex, and costly systems in terms of their capital investment, their operating and maintenance cost, and their impact on the power plant efficiency. In addition, their effectiveness as filters is still in question. Their apparent attributes, relative to ceramic barrier filter systems, result from their much less severe mechanical design and materials constraints, and the potential for more reliable, failure-free particle removal operation. The Westinghouse Science & Technology Center has proposed a novel moving granular-bed filter concept, the Standleg Moving Granular-Bed Filter (SMGBF) system, that may overcome the inherent deficiencies of the current state-of-the-art moving granular-bed filter technology. Themore » SMGBF is a compact unit that uses cocurrent gas-pellet contacting in an arrangement that greatly simplifies and enhances the distribution of dirty, process gas to the moving bed and allows effective disengagement of clean gas from the moving bed.« less