Abstract: Hot air drying is commonly used to dehydrate fruit and vegetable slices in the agricultural product processing industries.So it is important to establish a kinetic model of the drying process that can accurately describe heat and mass transfer for optimizing processes, improving drying quality and saving drying energy.However, fruits and vegetables as porous media, always have a significant volume shrinkage during drying, and many previous studies of porous media ignored the characteristics of macro-volume shrinkage with drying or more directly simplified the porous media as the materials just with a rigid skeleton, which was contributed to the situation in which there was no further analysis about the effects of the shrinkage on drying processing.Furthermore, eggplant, one of the main vegetable varieties in China, due to its short shelf life, was often sliced and dehydrated to preserve its equality instead of being eaten freshly, and the texture of eggplant is soft and porous, so its dry tissue is easy to shrink and deform during the whole hot air drying.Hence, in this paper, eggplant was chosen as the experimental porous material, and the testing methods, such as the density analysis, scanning electron microscope (SEM) analysis and mercury intrusion testing, were used to analyze the variation of sliced eggplant pore volume, structure and volume shrinkage during hot air drying.At the same time, a moisture diffusion kinetic model based on the shrinkage characteristics of the slices was established to study the effect of shrinkage on drying kinetics of sliced eggplant.As a result, internal pore volumes of the eggplant approximately linearly decreased with its moisture rate decreasing, but they were not obviously changed with hot air temperatures.During the drying processing, the proportion of the pores of smaller than 105 nm gradually increased, however, the pores of bigger than 105 nm that were dominant in the early stage of the drying gradually disappeared due to porous shrinkage caused by moisture loss when drying.In addition, according to the results of mercury intrusion testing, the peak of pore size decreased from 1.5×105 to 4×104 nm.In consideration of shrinkage properties of porous media, this work explored the influence of drying temperature on internal structure of sliced eggplant and modified the drying kinetic models based on the Fick’s second diffusion law.Among those volume shrinkage models, Hatamipour model and Quadratic model could describe the real volume shrinkage better.After modifying the drying model based on Fick’s second law with Quadratic shrinkage model that was selected as the best empirical shrinkage model due to its simplicity and accuracy, the convective drying kinetic model of eggplant slices could fit the experimental results more accurately.Moreover, apparent activation energy (AAE) of the sliced eggplant increased from 20.69 to 25.76 kJ/mol, indicating that the shrinkage of eggplant increased the mass transfer resistance during the process, which proved that the effective diffusion coefficient of water was overestimated obviously when not considering the influence of shrinkage on dynamics during the drying.In short, the modified kinetics models can provide a more objective evaluation of the drying characteristics of the deformable porous material and the reference for the optimization of its drying process.