In this work, the thermo-fluid performance of a biomass drying chamber with innovative tray configurations has been numerically investigated by solving the governing equations of mass, momentum, energy, and turbulence using Fluent 17. The effect of tray number, tray length, tray arrangement, and hole arrangement on the tray surface has been examined in detail. An enhancement factor has been presented to account for the heat transfer and the associated pressure drop. The results show that both the heat transfer and the pressure drop increase with an increase in tray number and optimum tray number is decided based on the highest enhancement factor. Six different tray arrangements have been examined and it has been found that alternative packed side and rear-front walls arrangement of trays is most effective from the thermo-fluid performance point of view. Based on the hole arrangement investigation, it has been revealed that compared to the inline hole arrangement, the staggered arrangement resulted in higher heat transfer performance with almost no addition to pressure drop. Correlations have been developed to predict the enhancement factor for different tray lengths, tray numbers, and inline and staggered hole arrangements, which help design an efficient and economic biomass drying chamber. (c) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.