Abstract: Abstract: Drying is the last process in each category of tea processing, which includes first-drying and final-firing, and first-drying is more essential. The role of first-drying is evaporating water content in tea products, and more importantly, promoting the occurrence of the thermochemical reaction at the same time. The reaction promotes the transformation and improvement of quality substances, and the formation of excellent aroma, taste, color and other tea qualities. At present, the main use of first-drying technology in the current production includes hot air first-drying technology, carding machine first-drying technology, microwave first-drying technology, low temperature vacuum drying technology, and so on. Although the existing first-drying technologies can enhance the flavor and taste quality of tea with different degrees, they mostly have low thermal efficiency, inaccurate temperature controlling, uneven heat distribution, poor and unstable quality, and other issues. For these reasons, based on the hot air first-drying technology that is the most widely used, our team has adopted a new type of electromagnetic heating technology, the waste heat recovery unit and oil-air exchanger to develop the chain plate dryer with electromagnetic heat (China patent number: ZL201420816998.8), in order to enhance the tea flavor and taste quality, obtain stable and high-quality tea, and at the same time enhance the thermal efficiency and production efficiency. The structure composition and technical characteristics of this chain plate dryer with electromagnetic heat were introduced in this article. Then the parameters of this new first-drying technology of green tea were optimized. In order to explore the influence of hot air first-drying process with electromagnetic heat on the quality of green tea, based on the results of previous single factor experiments, using main biochemical composition contents of first-drying samples and sensory evaluation score of made tea as investigation index, the orthogonal design and extreme analysis were used to optimize process parameters (hot air temperature, hot air wind speed, transmission speed, and so on) of chain plate dryer with electromagnetic heat. And the new first-drying technology was compared with hot air first-drying with coal as fuel, first-drying with tea carding machine, and hot air first-drying with electric heating tube. According to the results of quality biochemical composition and sensory evaluation, the optimal first-drying parameters combination of chain plate dryer with electromagnetic heat was determined as follows: Hot air temperature was 115 ℃, hot air wind speed was 1 200 r/min, and transmission speed was 1 050 r/min, and the most significant factor in these 3 factors was hot air wind speed. With these process parameters, amino acids, tea polyphenols, chlorophyll, soluble sugar, catechins, and caffeine of first-drying samples reached 2.31%, 17.61%, 1.13 mg/g, 5.01%, 10.74% and 2.01%, respectively, and quality material weighted value was 7.66%, which was significantly higher than the other processes. And the shape, color, taste, and aroma of made tea with the new first-drying technology were the best and the sensory quality score was 86.40, which was significantly higher than other first-drying methods. The energy consumption was 0.76 yuan/kg, which reduced by more than 70% compared with hot air first-drying with electric heating tube; the temperature rose very rapidly, and warming time was only 10 min, which reduced by more than 50% compared with traditional hot air first-drying with coal as fuel; the design of the waste heat recovery device greatly improved the utilization rate of heat energy, and the thermal efficiency was up to 50%; and the production efficiency was 150 kg/h, which was more than 3 times higher than the traditional hot air first-drying with electric heating tube, and meanwhile, the precise and stable control of temperature and the uniform distribution of hot air established solid foundation for obtaining high quality and stable tea quality.