The dew point evaporative cooler has been proposed to replace the mechanical vapor compression chiller in air sensible cooling, for its significantly larger energy efficiency and simpler system layout. Many of the existing studies focused on applying a first-law thermodynamic analysis to the dew point evaporative cooler, however, its performance involving the second-law thermodynamic assessment remains unclear. Therefore, in this paper, an exergy analysis of the counter-flow dew point evaporative cooler is conducted. The exergy performance of the dew point evaporative cooling process is examined by incorporating the first law of thermodynamics for energy and mass balances. A counter-flow dew point evaporative cooler prototype has been designed, fabricated and tested to investigate its cooling performance. A 2-D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is then formulated to simulate the flow, temperature and humidity fields of the cooler. The model agrees well with the acquired experimental data with the maximum discrepancy of 5.6%. The exergy flow, efficiency and efficiency ratio of the cooler are discussed under various simulation conditions. Key findings that emerged from this study reveal that the saturated air state at ambient temperature is the rational dead state to properly describe the physical mechanisms involved in the dew point evaporative cooling process. The exergy efficiency ratio of the dew point evaporative cooler is greater than 1.0, highlighting a remarkable second-law efficiency for air conditioning applications. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.