An Investigation of Indirect Evaporative Coolers, IEC With Respect to Thermal Comfort Criteria.

In this work, the effects of air stream direction in the channels of indirect evaporative cooler (IEC) on system performance have been investigated. In addition, the dependence of system performance on outdoor air temperature and relative humidity has been studied to determine the allowable conditions for proper operation of the system, with respect to thermal comfort criteria. For this; the different types of IECs were investigated using the CFD technique. Several codes were defined in MATLAB for modeling the parallel flow, counter flow and cross flow layout. The CFD program was validated against theoretical data from the literature and good agreement between the prediction and measurement was achieved. The calculated results show that when the air relative humidity is lower than 70% the system can prepare a goodindoor condition even at 50°C, and a higher performance is achieved by using the IEC with counter current configuration. The results showed that IECs can be successfully used in hot and humid climates to fulfill the indoor thermal comfort conditions.