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Uncontrollable ambient conditions are the main factors limiting the self-adaption control of an industrial drying system. To achieve the goal of accurate control of the drying process, the influence of the ambient conditions on the drying behavior should be taken into consideration when modeling the drying process. Present work introduced an industrial drying system with a loading capacity of 50 t, two artificial neural network prediction models with (IANN) and without (OANN) considering the ambient conditions were established using artificial neural network modeling approach. The ambient conditions on the moisture content (<i>MC</i>), exergy efficiency of the heat exchanger (<i>η_ex,h</i>) and specific recovered radiant energy (<i>Er</i>) of the drying process were also investigated. The results showed that the <i>η_ex,h</i> and <i>Er</i> increase with the increase of ambient temperature while the drying time decrease with the increase of the ambient temperature. The IANN model has a better prediction performance that that of OANN model. An optimal architecture of 9-2-12-3 artificial neuron network model was developed and the best prediction performance of the artificial neural network (ANN) model were found at a training epoch number of 30, and a momentum coefficient of 0.4, where the coefficient of determination of moisture content, exergy efficiency of heat exchanger, and the specific recovered radiant energy, respectively are 0.998, 0.992, and 0.980, indicating that the model has an excellent prediction performance and can be used in engineering practice.