The modelling of the coupled heat and mass transfer processes prevalent in drying non-hygroscopic capillary particulate materials is dealt with. An improved unstructured vertex-centred edge-based finite volume algorithm is employed for this purpose. Enhancements include reformulation of boundary integral flux-averaging as well as the use of a compact stencil in the computation of diffusive terms. A notable increase in accuracy is demonstrated. The developed algorithm is further validated against experimental data. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.