In view of the problem that the cylinder cooler cannot recover the sensible heat of pellets in the rotary hearth furnace process in the metallurgical industry, a new scheme of using the drum cooler widely used in circulating fluidized bed boilers to cool the pellets is proposed, the heat transfer model of the drum cooler is established accordingly, and the final temperature of the pellets and cooling water as well as the apparent heat transfer coefficient of the cooler by calculating are obtained. The results show that, the final temperature of the pellets decreases with the increase of drum speed, and increases with the increase of pellet flow and cooling water inlet temperature; the outlet temperature of the cooling water increases with the increase of the metallized pellet flow rate and the cooling water inlet temperature; the apparent heat transfer coefficient of the cooler increases with the increase of drum speed, pellet flow rate and cooling water inlet temperature, and decreases with the increase of cooling water flow rate. The drum cooler is introduced to reduce the temperature of the pellets from 1100 ℃ to 70 ℃, and at the same time, the oxidation problem inside the pellets is avoided, which meets the cooling requirements of high-temperature pellets and proves the feasibility of using drum cooler in rotary hearth furnace process.