Two types of tube bundles are designed,which are,respectively,composed of six tubes arranged in the boiling chamber.The nucleate pool boiling performance of smooth tube bundles and sintered porous surface tube bundles with deionized water as a medium are experimentally studied at atmospheric and sub-atmospheric pressures,respectively.The experimental results indicate that the boiling heat transfer coefficients of the two types of tube bundles increase with the increase in pressure under vacuum conditions as they behave under ordinary pressure.As the pressure varies from 10 to 100 kPa,it also can be seen that the heat transfer coefficient of the sintered porous surface tube is increased by 0.2 to 4 times compared with the smooth one under the same operating parameters.In addition,the experimental data show that a definite bundle effect exists in both sintered porous surface tubes and smooth tubes under vacuum conditions.