In this paper, the porous ceramic pipes with high water sucking ability have been constructed for the evaporative cooling wall. Due to the water soaking-up ability of the porous pipes and the evaporation of water when their lower end is placed in water, the cooling of the combining wall can be supplied continuously. A mathematical model on the heat and mass transfer in the unsaturated porous media is developed to analyze the effects of ambient condition and the phase content on the cooling performance of the porous evaporative pipe. The influences of the wind speed (WS) or air speed (AS) on the temperature of the wet porous pipe surface are relevant to the ambient relative humidity. The temperature and the moisture content in the porous pipe as well as the temperature gradient and the vapor moving speed influence the water evaporating or the vapor condensing in the porous pipe. The experiments have also been conducted to study the evaporative cooling of the wet porous pipe, the water sucking characteristics of the porous pipe and the influences of the porous pipe arrangement on the cooling performance of the combining wall. The temperature variations of the porous pipe in the simulation accord with the test data. All these results should be taken into account for the promotion and application of the evaporative cooling of wet porous media. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.