Thermal management is an important issue in the development of micro-tubular stacks. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has the potential to assist in the specification of operating conditions and designs that minimise temperature gradients and maximise the use of heat produced in the SOFC stacks. This paper reports the construction of a 20-cell micro-tubular SOFC stack and a CFD model of this system using the commercial code, Fluent 6.0. Model results for a single cell are reported. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.