Cooling towers play a crucial role in various industries to dissipate the heat of circulating water. This process involves the direct contact of atmospheric air and hot water from the condenser within a porous packed bed. The cooling towers suffers from their large size which results in escalating construction and maintenance expenses. In the present work, a rotating packed bed has been investigated experimentally for its evaporative heat transfer performance and is proposed as an alternative to cooling towers. In the chemical and processing sectors, rotating packed beds are being explored as a potential alternative to conventional distillation towers due to their process intensification capabilities. The principal reason behind this adaptation is the enhanced mass transfer rates achievable by rotating packed beds in a compact size. The aim of this study is to lay the foundation for rotating packed beds to achieve similar process intensification in various heat transfer applications. For this purpose, the parameters that describe the performance of a cooling tower such as air pressure drop, cooling range, heat rejection rate from water, cooling effectiveness, and Merkel number were selected to assess the performance of the rotating packed bed. The effect of various factors such as mass flow rate of air, mass flow rate of water, water inlet temperature, and rotational speed on the performance parameters was observed. Response surface methodology was used for the design of experiments, development of the regression equations, and optimization of the performance parameters of rotating packed bed. The cooling effectiveness value of up to 0.59 and the Merkel number of up to 1.88 were achieved in the rotating packed bed.