This work presents an improved apparatus and a numerical approach to obtain the estimate of thermal diffusivity of complex materials. Transient thermal response at the axis of cylindrical sample is measured when boundary temperature is suddenly changed. Instead of assuming an ideal step temperature excitement, a measured temperature of a material boundary was employed. An iterative procedure, based on minimizing a sum of squares function with the Levenberg-Marquardt method, is used to solve the inverse problem. A graphical user interface is built to enable easy use of the inverse thermal diffusivity estimation method. The reference materials used to evaluate the method are Agar water gel, glycerol and Ottawa quartz sand. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.