A novel experimental technique is introduced to study fluid-particle heat transfer in dense arrays of stationary particle. First a Constant Temperature Anemometer is reconfigured to a heat transfer probe. The thermal driving force is defined as the difference between the probe temperature and the initial fluid temperature and well known in our system. Second an abacus-like structure is employed to accurately control the solids volume fraction. The solids fraction was varied between 0 and 0.6 with increments of 0.1. The Reynolds number varied between 0 and 800. This combination of approaches allows for a very well-defined system, that can be studied both experimentally and numerically, and as such can serve as a validation of heat transfer studies with Direct Numerical Simulations, in fluid-particle systems. A single particle in unbounded flow, the effect of inter-particle distance and shielding effects for an inline array of three spheres as well as semi-structured arrays of particles are studied. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.