The purpose was to deal with organic sludge with high content and large volume effectively, and achieve to combine sludge drying with low temperature pyrolytic process. The current study focused on the effect of drying temperature and heating rate on rate of weight loss and moisture content as well as quality of sludge during drying process. The rate of drying and moisture content of sludge was also investigated at different temperatures. Furthermore, a mathematical model was developed for sludge drying. The experimental result showed that the drying characteristics of sludge had resemblance with the theoretical three stages of drying, and the rule of three stages was also obvious from different drying characteristic curves. It took very little time to warm up, and the constant speed state did not last long, while the most time was used during the final decelerating phase. With the increase of temperature, the faster the evaporation of the sludge was, the sooner the largest drying rate was, and the bigger the value was. Compared with the effect of experiment at 250℃, the effect of experimental at 240℃ was more ideal. The results showed that maximum drying rate and minimum drying time was observed for sludge at 240℃ drying temperature. The determination coefficient for the predictive and measured values of the quadratic model were 0.9924, with a RMSE and RSS of 0.035 and 0.032, respectively. Quadratic model had better correlation coefficient to the sludge drying process. The needed time could be calculated approximately with the required water content that could be gotten through the model equation. This would be of some reference value for industrial production and research.