Several studies have investigated indirect evaporative cooling (IEC) systems with regeneration, both experimentally and mathematically. The mathematical models developed to analyze the IEC are commonly based on ε-NTU method. However, this study develops the mathematical model from first principles, mass, momentum and energy balances for higher accuracy and deeper insights about the solution. In addition, temperature dependent properties are assumed for the flow domain. The developed model has been validated against existing experimental work and the results are in close agreement. Five influential parameters on the performance of IEC are studied using one-way sensitivity analysis; these are air velocity in dry channel, channel length, dry channel height, wet channel height, and air flow ratio in wet to dry channels. IEC with selected design parameters is simulated for two hostile climates in the middle east where both are known for high summer temperatures. One with high relative humidity while the other with significantly lower relative humidity. Although, the performance of the IECs for dry climates outperform the humid ones, yet such systems were still capable of reducing the temperature around 13 °C on average for humid climates. © 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

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