High-temperature gas flow can cause melt, crack, erosion, and wear of tubes. In order to reduce these side effects, the inner wall of a hollow cylindrical tube is generally coated with a resistive material, for example, a steel pipe coated with a chrome layer. In addition, it is important to know heat flux applied to the tube wall and temperature distribution in the tube wall for appropriate design of the hollow cylindrical tube. In this study, three-dimensional inverse heat conduction modeling of a multi-layered hollow cylindrical tube was conducted. The thermal resistance network (TRN) scheme was employed to solve the heat conduction in the tube. The temperature distribution in the tube was estimated from a measured temperature on the outer wall of the tube by Kalman filter. At the same time, unknown heat flux on the inner wall of the tube was calculated by the recursive least squares algorithm. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.