The potential to use waste heat to co-generate cooling and fresh water from saline water using adsorption on silica recently prompted a detailed study of the performance of adsorption-based desalination (AD) using a thermodynamic model (Wu et al., 2010). Further study has now revealed that the nature of the cycles and the performance are significantly influenced by the evaporator temperature relative to the cooling water temperature. This paper reports this study. Following an enumeration of all possible thermodynamic cycles for an AD system that arise from varying the evaporator temperature relative to the cooling water temperature, the effects of operating water temperatures and the silica gel water vapour capacity on the fresh water productivity and cycle energy consumption are presented and discussed. (C) 2011 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.