A cross-flow moving-bed granular filter was investigated for its performance to filter the fast pyrolysis char-laden gas with an aim to elucidate the influence of the number of filtration stages, the filter media size and mass flow rate on the collection efficiency of the filter and the pressure drop across the bed. The results showed that the two-stage filtration gave higher collection efficiency than the one stage, especially for small filter media size. The decrease of the filter media size significantly increased the collection efficiency, while slightly increased the pressure drop. In addition, the increase of the mass flow rate led to the reduction in the collection efficiency. Within the scope of the parameters investigated, the maximum collection efficiency of the granular filter was 99.79% which occurred when applying single stage filtration with the filter media size and the mass flow rate of 0.425-0.600 mm and 8 g/min, respectively. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.