Physics Asked by Bort on December 29, 2020
Evaporative cooling is a technique used to cool air by using the evaporation of a liquid.
My google research on evaporative cooling shows a ubiquitous concept of forcing air through a pad/membrane/foam/sponge that holds water, and the air exiting the pad is colder to a degree that depends on the ambient humidity. Apparently the output can be 10C or more colder than the input.
(Image from wikipedia.org)
As I understand, it’s the evaporation of the water that causes the air to be cooled. And, as I take it, it’s the heat from air at the input being absorbed by the water and causing a phase change that cools it.
What if the water is atomized by something such as an ultrasonic humidifier?
Ultrasonic humidifiers use a “speaker” of sorts to vibrate water into a vapor. I can’t find any mention of ultrasonic humidifiers being used to cool a room.
At first it seemed to me that they would not cool the air, as water was simply atomized (instead of the heat from the air going in to a phase change).
But thinking about this another way: The atomized water particles would mostly evaporate in the air, which should thus cool it, right?
Do ultrasonic humidifiers cool air to the same degree that pad-based evaporative coolers do? (Assuming similar water volume used). If not, can ultrasonic humidifiers be used in a more elaborate system to cool the air?
What you propose has been in use for many years. It is called an air washer, which uses a pump to spray water through nozzles into a fine mist which is mixed with the incoming air stream and then passed through a trap that catches any unevaporated water droplets before the cooled air is distributed.
Answered by niels nielsen on December 29, 2020
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