Drying of foods is a process widely used to provide products with longer life and a wide range of applications. However, there are still challenges to improve the process and product quality, such as reducing the time, energy used and nutrients degradation. In this work, two pre-treatments were applied to improve the radiation drying process: the mechanical perforations and ethanol immersion. The effect of these two pre-treatments in drying and further rehydration kinetics wee studied for potato slices (2.0x0.5 cm). The treatment with ethanol (92.8% v/v) was conducted by immersion for 15 min at 25 °C. This treatment was performed to evaluate the effect of Marangoni flow (by promoting gradient tension surface). A total of 17 perforation were made for each potato slice using a 1.2 mm thin cylinder. This treatment was performed to evaluate the effect of promoting routes to capillarity flow. The control (C), ethanol treated (E) and perforated (P) slices were dried using a multi-spectrum lamp (95% infrared radiation) at 100 °C set temperature, recording the data every second. Rehydration was performed by immersion in distilled water at 25 °C. Comparing with the control sample, the ethanol and perforation pre-treatments decrease the time of drying process, increasing about 29% and 15% the drying rate, respectively. On the other hand, the perforation increased the rehydration rate and water retention. However, the ethanol pre-treated samples show the lower rehydration rate and water retention. These results show an important contribution because while the ethanol is suitable to improve the potato drying process, it did not have positive impact during its rehydration. Additionally, perforations in the samples is a simple operation, and it seems appropriate to improve the potato drying and rehydration processes.