A Review of Evaporative Cooling Technologies

Air-conditioning plays an essential role in ensuring occupants thermal comfort. However, building's electricity bills have become unaffordable. Yet the commercially dominant cooling systems are intensively power-consuming ones, i.e. vapor compression systems. This paper aims to review the recent developments concerning evaporative cooling technologies that could potentially provide sufficient cooling comfort, reduce environmental impact and lower energy consumption in buildings. An extensive literature review has been conducted and mapped out the state-of-the-art evaporative cooling systems. The review covers direct evaporative cooling, indirect evaporative cooling and combined direct-indirect cooling systems. The indirect evaporative coolers include both wet-bulb temperature evaporative coolers and dew point evaporative coolers have been of particular interest because of high thermal performance. The dew point evaporative coolers have shown great potential of development and research opportunity for their improved efficiency and low energy use.