Recent research progress is reviewed concerning the particle heat transfer, drag force and thermophoretic force involved in the modeling of the thermal plasma processing of particulate matter. Some suggestions are proposed about how to calculate the heat and momentum transfer between a plasma flow and a suspended particle in the study of the particle behavior. For the free-molecule regime, analytical expressions obtained in recent years can be employed. For the continuum regime, many different correlations for the heat transfer and drag force on a particle in a flowing plasma have been proposed and employed, but more further studies are required. For the jump or near-continuum regime, the analytical results based on a heat-conduction-potential jump approach are still recommended only with a small modification, although some conflicting remarks exist in recent references.