An apparatus was designed and built for the study on pool-boiling heat transfer characteristics of pure and mixed fluids at cryogenic temperature. With this apparatus, extensive measurements were carried out to investigate the pool-boiling behaviors of pure methane and three binary mixtures of methane + ethane, methane + propane and methane + isobutane, as well as a multicomponent mixture of methane, ethane, propane and isobutane. The present measurements were performed in a descending heat flux procedure ranging from 250 kW/m(2) to 30 kW/m(2) at a fixed pressure of 0.13 MPa. Comprehensive measured data were presented in this paper, and also compared with some existing correlations. The deviations between the measured data and the predicted results locate within +/- 25% range. (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.