Performance evaluation of a cross-flow Indirect Evaporative Cooling system with high-pressure water atomization: An experimental study

Indirect Evaporative Cooling (IEC) systems based on high-pressure water atomization represent an effective solution to reduce energy consumption in air-conditioning applications, particularly in high internal load environments such as data centers. This work presents an experimental investigation of a cross-flow IEC system with high-pressure atomization, focusing on the influence of water flow rate, airflow arrangement, and secondary air inlet temperature on wet-bulb effectiveness and fraction of evaporated water. Tests were carried out under operating conditions representative of data center applications. Results show that high-pressure atomization ensures consistently high performance, with wet-bulb effectiveness values always between 0.62 and 0.74. When water in introduced from the top of the system (TOP configuration), variations in its flow rate have a stronger impact at low water flow rates and high secondary air inlet temperatures. The qualitative performance trend is comparable to that observed for medium-pressure systems, but under equivalent operating conditions the high-pressure system achieves considerably higher effectiveness, with differences of 10–15% in the TOP arrangement. Finally, the TOP configuration provides better performance than the SIDE configuration, namely when water is injected from the side of the system, although the difference is less pronounced than in medium-pressure systems. These findings highlight the potential of high-pressure water atomization IEC systems to enhance cooling performance and support sustainable thermal management in next-generation data centers.