The forced convective beat transfer characteristics for incompressible power-law fluids past a bundle of circular cylinders have been investigated numerically. The cylinder-to-cylinder hydrodynamic interactions have been approximated via a simple cell model. The momentum and energy equations have been solved using a finite difference based numerical method for a range of physical and kinematic conditions. The role of the two commonly used thermal boundary conditions, namely, constant temperature or constant heat flux, on heat transfer characteristics has also been studied. Extensive numerical results elucidating the effect of shear-thinning viscosity on the values of Nusselt number have been obtained for Peclet numbers ranging from 1 to 5000, Reynolds number in the range 1-500, flow behaviour index 1 greater than or equal to n greater than or equal to 0.5 and three values of voidages, namely, 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6, typical of tubular heat exchangers and tube banks. Under all conditions, varying levels of enhancement in Nusselt number are observed due to shear-thinning behaviour. The surface averaged Nusselt number shows strong dependence on the values of voidage, power-law index, Reynolds and Peclet numbers. The paper is concluded by presenting comparisons with the scant experimental results available in the literature. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.