A rotary kiln furnace is one of the most widely used gas-solid reactors in the industrial field. Although the rotary kiln is a versatile system and has different size, approach to the reactor modeling can be generalized in terms of flow motion of the solid and gas phases, heat transfer, and chemical reactions on purpose. In this paper, starting from a zero-dimensional model and extending to higher dimension and comprehensive models, overall procedure of the design development of rotary kiln reactors and considerations are presented. The approaches to performance analysis of the reactors are introduced and examples of application cases are presented.