Computational Evaluation of the Cooling Performance of a Wet Porous Evaporative Cooler for Building

The paper deals with numerical study of evaporative cooling process of ambient air. The liquid and air streams are modeled as two coupled laminar boundary layers incorporating non Darcian models of the inertia and boundary effects., The governing equations and the associated boundary conditions are discretized by means of the finite volume method implemented on a staggered mesh and the velocity pressure coupling is processed by the SIMPLE algorithm. The influences of the inlet mass flow of the drying gas, porous layer thickness and the porosity on the evaporative cooling process are analyzed.