Experimental study of bubble growth on novel fin structures during pool boiling

•The heat transfer performance of two fin structures, namely regular and modified fins, was experimentally studied in a pool boiling facility.•An artificial nucleation site was fabricated on the heated surface to enhance the heat transfer performance.•The modified fin with the artificial nucleation site showed higher heat transfer performance than the regular fin.•A multilayer perceptron artificial neural network is applied for modeling the bubble departure diameter in boiling.