Abstract: In order to effectively remove the dust accumulated on the fins of the heat exchanger in the thin plate tobacco dryer, a cleaning device was designed. The device mainly consists of a moveable air jet unit, in which the air jets move vertically to remove the dust building up on the tube fins of the heat exchanger, and a negative pressure dust collecting unit collect the removed dust to avoid dust pollution. The designed cleaning device was tested on a KLD-2 thin plate tobacco dryer in Lanzhou Cigarette Factory. The results showed that it took 10 minutes for the device to clean the heat exchanger without disassembling the tobacco dryer, which was 26 minutes less than that by manual cleaning method with an air gun to blow off the dust after disassembling the equipment. After cleaning, the qualified rate of the supplementary hot air velocity of the tobacco dryer reached 95.8%, showing an increase of 14.4 percentage points compared to that by manual cleaning. This device offers technical support for the promotion of the maintenance efficiency of thin plate tobacco dryers.