A deterministic model is developed to describe the superheated steam drying process of single wood particles. A comparison between calculated data and experimental observations infers that the moisture-dependent effective diffusivity is suitable to be used for beechwood material drying. To reduce the computational cost of the deterministic drying model, a semi-empirical model is proposed within the framework of a reaction engineering approach (REA). The validity of the proposed model is checked by comparing against experimental data from literature. The experimental drying behavior may fairly be reflected by the reduced model. Due to the simplicity and predictive ability of the REA model, this semi-empirical model can be implemented to describe heat and mass transfer between a population of single particles and a drying agent in dryer models.