Soot particles emitted from combustion processes are often coated by non‐absorbing organic materials, which enhance the global warming effect of soot particles. It is of importance to study the condensation characteristics of soot particles experimentally and theoretically to reduce the uncertainty of the climate impact of soot particles. In this study, the condensational growth of soot particles in a tubular coater was modeled by a one‐dimensional (1D) plug flow model and a two‐dimensional (2D) laminar flow model. The effects of 2D heat and mass transports on the predicted particle growth were investigated. The temperature and coating material vapor concentration distributions in radial direction, which the 1D model could not accounted for, affected substantially the particle growth in the coater. Under the simulated conditions, the differences between the temperatures and vapor concentrations near the wall and at the tube center were large. The neglect of these variations by the 1D model resulted in a large error in modeling the mass transfer and aerosol dynamics occurring in the coater. The 1D model predicted the average temperature and vapor concentration quite accurately but overestimated the average diameter of the growing particles considerably. At the outermost grid, at which condensation begins earliest due to the lowest temperature and saturation vapor concentration, condensing vapor was exhausted rapidly because of the competition between condensations on the wall and on the particle surface, decreasing the growth rate. At the center of the tube, on the other hand, the growth rate was low due to high temperature and saturation vapor concentration. The effects of Brownian diffusion and thermophoresis were not high enough to transport the coating material vapor quickly from the tube center to the wall. The 1D model based on perfect radial mixing could not take into account this phenomenon, resulting in a much higher growth rate than what the 2D model predicted. The result of this study indicates that contrary to a previous report for a thermodenuder, 2D heat and mass transports must be taken into account to model accurately the condensational particle growth in a coater.