Department of Chemical Engineering, Yildiz Technical University, Esenler, Istanbul, Turkey E-mail: skipcak@yildiz.edu.tr Manuscript received online 26 April 2019, revised and accepted 20 July 2019 Mussel has impressive nutritional values, which contains many vitamins, minerals and proteins by comparison with other shellfish. Infrared drying (IR) has gained popularity in the food industry due to its rapid drying rate/response time and superior thermal efficiency compared to traditional drying methods for the recent years. In this study, various temperatures (60, 70 and 80ºC) were applied to mussels via infrared dryer to investigate the temperature effect on drying characteristics, effective moisture diffusivity and activation energy. The drying times are obtained as 405, 255 and 165 min for 60, 70 and 80ºC, respectively. Drying temperature at 80ºC was found as the optimum temperature in the experiments for quality of mussel and energy consumption. To identify the drying kinetic of mussel, seven mathematical models were applied to the experimental results and Alibas model provided to best estimation for each temperature according to drying data. The results are found as 0.999886, 0.999916 and 0.999964 for coefficient of determination (R2 ); 0.000011, 0.000009 and 0.000006 for reduced chisquare (X2 ) and 0.002946, 0.002614 and 0.001854 for root mean square error (RMSE) at 60, 70 and 80ºC, respectively. Effective moisture diffusivity values are found as 4.23×10–9, 7×10–9 and 1.17×10–8 m2 /s at 60, 70 and 80ºC, respectively. It is clearly seen that the effective moisture diffusivity values increased with temperature increment. The effect of temperature on the moisture diffusivity depends on Arrhenius equation. According to the relationship 49.67 kJ/mol is calculated as an activation energy of mussel.