Bananas are an extremely perishable fruit that do not support freezing and as such, they need to be dried in order to preserve the fruit for later use. The process of osmotic dehydration followed by air-drying was studied and modeled, so it could be optimized. The developed model has been validated with experimental data and simulations have shown how the operating conditions affect the process. An optimization was done using the model in order to search for the best operation condition that would reduce the total processing time. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.