Developments in evaporative cooling and enhanced evaporative cooling - A review

Evaporative cooling is a widely employed energy-saving cooling method. It has found applications in a variety of different areas such as HVAC, industrial process cooling, and personal microclimate cooling, as stand-alone cooling processes or in combination with conventional cooling technologies. Evaporative cooling could be classified into different categories such as air-mediated vs water-mediated evaporative cooling and direct vs indirect evaporative cooling. Evaporative cooling could be enhanced by means such as desiccants, membranes, and the combination of desiccants and membranes. This paper strives to provide a comprehensive review on the recent developments and applications of different enhanced evaporative cooling technologies.