Climate change is leading to an increasing interest in desalination. The large 'carbon footprint' of traditional desalination technologies has spurned interest in several potential alternative technologies. This contribution here is concerned with one of these alternatives: adsorption-based desalination (AD), which uses waste heat or solar energy to generate potable water and, depending on the cycle details, cooling as well. We have previously proposed a number of possible theoretical thermodynamic cycles of AD and analysis thereof (Wu et al., Applied Energy 90: 316-22, 2011). In this paper, the practical implementation of these cycles is outlined and their validity experimentally shown. This work means these models can now be used with confidence to better understanding the performance of AD systems. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.