Liquid desiccant cooling system (LDCS) is an alternative air-conditioning system with promising energy-saving potential. To further explore the potential of LDCS, it is important to reveal the mass transfer mechanism of dehumidification process. The classical mass transfer model does well in theoretical analysis, but failed to explain the dehumidification reverse phenomenon in experiments. Therefore, this paper proposes a mass transfer model based on the kinetic theory for improvement. Through theoretical and experimental research, it proves the new model clearly describes the dehumidification mechanism and did better in predicting the dehumidification reverse phenomenon. This paper also gives a method through which we can get some important parameters of the new model from the mass transfer coefficient of the classical model. (c) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.