The paper presents an algorithm for solving inverse problems of heat transfer. The method is based oil iterative solving of direct and adjoint model equations with the aim to minimize a fitting functional An optimal choice of the step length along the descent direction is proposed. The algorithm has been used for the treatment of a steady-state problem of heat transfer in a region with holes The temperature and the heat flux density were known on the Outer boundary of the region. whereas these values on the boundaries of the holes are to be determined. The idea of the algorithm consist in solving of Neumann problems where the heat flux on the outer boundary is prescribed, whereas the heat flux on the inner boundary is guessed. The guess is being improved iteratively to minimize the mean quadratic deviation of the solution on the outer boundary from the given distribution. The results obtained show that the algorithm provides smooth, non-oscillating, and stable solutions to inverse problems of heat transfer, that is, it avoids disadvantages inherent in other computational methods for such problems. The ill-conditioning of inverse problems in the Hadamard sense is exhibited in that a very quick convergence of the fitting functional to its minimum does not imply a comparable rate of convergence of the recovered temperature on the inner boundary to the true distribution. The considered method can easily be extended to nonlinear problems Numerical calculation has been carried out with the FE program Felics developed at the Chair of Mathematical Modelling of the Technical University of Munich. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved