PREDICTING THE PERFORMANCE OF EVAPORATIVE COOLERS AND CONDENSERS

The thermal performance of evaporative coolers and condensers can be predicted theoretically by solving a system of coupled nonlinear differential equations. All numerical solutions of this system of equations proposed in the literature are too complex for practical application. Known analytical solutions, based on different simplifying assumptions, may cause large errors of up to 40% in the predicted heat load. Correlations have been developed for a new design method which allow to estimate the errors of the most simple analytical solution as functions of dimensionless operating parameters. With errors of less than 12% for coolers and 10% for condensers respectively the new method leads to far more accurate results than the analytical solutions.