We develop and validate against experimental measurements a steady-state two-stage flooded refrigerant evaporator model for a heat pump drying system. A prototype two-stage heat pump dryer test facility was designed, built and instrumented to provide the required measurements for the validation of the model. Repeatability and data quality tests were conducted to evaluate the accuracy of measurements. Experimental data could be reproduced to within +/- 6.5 per cent of replicated air and refrigerant side measurements for the same evaporator's air inlet conditions while the discrepancy of energy balance at the air-side and refrigerant-side was observed to be within +/- 8.9 per cent. The two-stage evaporator model predicted the air-side total heat and latent heat transfer of the two-stage evaporator to within (-6.3 per cent, 7.6 per cent) and (-11.5 per cent, 9.5 per cent), respectively. On the refrigerant-side, the model enabled the calculation of the degree of superheat to within (-10.6 per cent, 1.7 per cent). The model has shown that there is significant improvement in the heat recovered from a two-stage evaporator system compared to a single evaporator system. In addition, the model demonstrated that the improvement in total heat recovery could be as high as 40 per cent over its base-value when the latent to total load at the two-stage evaporator is increased. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.