AbstractThe purpose of this study is to obtain generalized drying curves which can be used in the prediction of drying times of porous solids in the falling‐rate period. The drying model introduced assumes that the movement of moisture in the solid body is by capillary motion, and that the major resistance to heat and mass transfer lies on the boundary layer at the solid surface. It has been applied to the drying of gypsum particles of various sizes in a rotary dryer at different feed rates and gas temperatures. The results show that the deviation between the experimental data and the ones predicted from theory is very small. The deviation increases at low moisture concentrations which may indicate that internal resistance to moisture flow starts to dominate the drying phenomen