In order to provide reference for optimization of drying technique and equipment of rapeseed hot-air drying, the drying characteristics of rapeseed thin layer hot-air drying was experimentally investigated, and the moisture content loss of rapeseed by means of volume weighted average and airflow distributions in the drying box were numerically studied.For the heat and mass transfer modeling, a code incorporating the effects of heat and moisture transfer was compiled by means of User-Defined Functions, and the Semi-Implicit Method for Pressure-Linked Equations was adopted to solve the constitutive equations governing the rapeseed drying by methodology of CFD within FLUENT.The drying characteristics of rapeseed showed that there is no constant rate drying stage for thin layer hot-air drying of rapeseed.The moisture transfer of rapeseed is mainly occurred in the former stage, and the drying rate of rapeseed decreases with drying process continued.The distribution of air temperature gradually changes with drying process continued, and the air temperature at the top of seed layer is higher than the temperatures at the center and exit of the drying box, which benefits the rapeseed thin layer hot-air drying.The distribution of air velocity reaches a stable status in quite a short period of time, air velocities at the top of seed layer and center of the drying box are nearly same, but with a small loss at position of the center, and air velocity at the exit of the drying box is much higher than those at positions of the former two.Numerical findings were compared with the experimental data as well, resulted in a considerably high agreement: mean relative errors of moisture content, air temperature and air velocity of modeling with experiments are 7.48 %, 1.07 % and 7.72 %, respectively.