Liquid desiccant dehumidification systems have drawn a great deal of attention in the HVAC industry due to its great energy saving potentials. Numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the relationships between the operating conditions and the system performance. However, it seems that the existing relationships were built improperly since almost all of them were established through the incomplete single-factor tests, rather than the full-factorial tests. This makes the existing work unable to clarify the overall significance of the various operating conditions on affecting the system performance. To address this unexplored issue, an L18 x L8 cross-product orthogonal array together with the statistical analysis method (ANOVA) was adopted in this work to investigate the significance of operating conditions in promoting the system performance (i.e. sensitivity analysis) and stability (i.e. stability analysis). 144 experimental and simulation runs were conducted within the ultrasonic atomization liquid desiccant dehumidification system (UADS) as the example to demonstrate the analysis. It was found that though direct influence on the system can be exerted by all the operating conditions, their significance differed markedly. Based on the analysis, the operating conditions can be classified into four types while the optimal conditions for the UADS were also figured out and validated. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.