The inverse methodology is employed to estimate the unknown heat flux distribution over the heater surface of a channel formed by two parallel plates with forced convection and surface radiation exchange, from the knowledge of the desired temperature and heat flux distributions over a given design surface. The energy and radiative transfer equations are solved by the finite-volume method and the net radiation method, respectively. The conjugate gradient method is used for minimization of an objective function, which is expressed by the sum of square residuals between estimated and desired heat fluxes over the design surface. The performance and accuracy of the present method for solving inverse problems are evaluated by some numerical experiments.