We fabricated and compared two high-temperature and high-pressure dust collector models: the conventional direct inletmodel, where a round gas inlet pipe is connected to the bottom of the collector at a right angle; and the inertial inlet model, where a rectangular gas inlet pipe is tangentially connected. Their effects on the filtration performance of a ceramic candle filter were tested at 800 ℃ and 3 atmand compared. The inertial inlet model showed a slower increase in pressure drop as the filtering process progressed owing to the reduced dust load on the filter. The average cleaning interval was 4.7 times longer than that of the direct inletmodel. The residual pressure drop increased in direct proportion to the filtration velocity and was about twice that of the inertial inlet model. The inertial inlet maintained a higher cleaning efficiency during operation than the direct inlet. The overall collection efficiency was over 99.999% with the inertial inlet model, allowing for slight variations according to the filtration velocity, and that of the direct inlet method was over 99.9% under the same conditions.