Abstract :
The use of water droplet evaporation in shower towers and passive downdraft evaporative cooling needs the estimation
of the time needed to completely evaporate the drops. To solve this problem, a cellular approach is proposed in which the
spray is considered as a pile of rigid spheres of equal size; each sphere has multiple layers and contains a drop in its center.
The evaporation takes place gradually from the superficial layer towards the internal layers. Parametric studies show the
influence of each variable on the evaporation time o f the droplets. The model may be used for sizing passive evaporative
cooling systems and towers for buildings using the passive evaporative down draught effect. A building equipped with a
shower tower has been tested in the framework of the European project PDEC/JOULE in Catania (Italy). The spraying
system was successfully sized by using the model proposed in this paper.
2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
