In this study, an energy and exergy analysis of the drying process of corn was developed for a hybrid dryer coupled with a PV system. The differential of the dryer is the fact that the PV system was used to feed an electrical heater and fans and also to preheat the drying air through the use of the PV panel rear side as heat exchanger, increasing the air temperature before the inlet of the solar collector. The performance of solar drying processes is extensively investigated in the literature, but usually the drying chamber is used as control volume in the analysis. The main contribution of this work is the assessment and comparison of the performance of the dryer using three different control volumes in the thermodynamic analysis: only the drying chamber, the drying chamber and the solar collector, referred to as solar dryer and the complete drying set, corresponding to the drying chamber, the solar collector and the PV module. The results indicated that the efficiency values found are greatly affected by the control volume used, with variations of the exergy efficiency ranging from 22.2% to 45.0%, depending on the control volume used. It was found that the higher efficiencies were found selecting the drying chamber as control volume (as usually chosen by most works from literature). For the complete drying set, the individual contributions of the exergy rates were evaluated. It was concluded that the main contribution to the input and output exergy are the heat transfer and the outflow exergy rates, respectively.