Abstract: Abstract: Cassava is widely distributed in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Cassava, potato and sweet potato are known as the world's 3 major potatoes. Cassava is native to the Amazon basin, which are now widely grown in China and Southeast Asia. Cassava is mainly used in food, medicine, industry and other fields, and known as the king of starch. Cassava has to be dried in a period of short time prior to storage or transportation, since the water content of the fresh cassava is as much as 65%-70% at harvest. Up to now, many scholars have done a lot of research on cassava. However, there are few studies on the drying process, drying technology and drying equipment for cassava. In order to develop and optimize drying process of cassava, the effects of the thickness of cassava slices and the temperature of drying process were experimentally investigated. Fresh cassavas were obtained from Rongxian County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. They were washed and dried before being stored in a fridge at 2-5 ℃. Cassavas were cut into 5-9 mm pieces, and then were placed in a drying oven with a preset temperature that could be adjusted from 60 to 100 ℃ with a 10 ℃ interval for different cases. The drying process by hot air was simulated with an electric drying oven with forced convective air flow. The samples were taken from the oven every 5 min during the experiment. The cassava slices taken from the drying oven were placed in a silica gel dryer. The cassava slices were cooled to room temperature and weighed with an electronic balance. The moisture of cassava was calculated according to the actual weight change. The effects of different temperatures and different thicknesses on the drying process of cassava were compared. The results showed that cassavas were denatured due to the high temperature, however, the low temperature made water evaporation incomplete. The slice with thinner thickness was prone to be broken up, and on the contrary, the thicker thickness prolonged the drying time to reach the targeted water content. The experimental results show that the drying temperature of 80-100 ℃ and the thickness of 6-8 mm are better. It was found that the cassava drying process was fitted well with the Wang and Singh model. Based on the water content curves on dry basis, the critical water contents of cassava with different thicknesses were obtained. The experimental results show that the one-stage scheme with constant temperature can only reduce the water content of cassava to about 35% when being dried for 70 min, and fails to reduce moisture content of cassava to safe moisture in the limited short time. In order to avoid the undesired sharp decrease in the drying rate as the water content reached the critical value during single-stage drying process, an optimal two-stage drying scheme of first low temperature and then high temperature was proposed. According to the two-stage drying scheme, the cassava drying process was also proposed. The equipment of the proposed drying process mainly includes the fan, the feeder, the first drying section, the second drying section, the heat exchanger, and so on. The cassava slices of 6-8 mm in thickness were fed into the first drying section by feeder. After the moisture content was reduced to a certain value, the cassavas were fed into the second drying section. Finally, the cassava slices eventually reached the safe moisture content. This cassava drying process provides a good solution for cassava drying and production.