This special issue of the International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat and Fluid Flow comprises selected papers presented during the Numerical Heat Transfer 2012 International Conference (NHT2012).The conference was organised as a Special Interest Conference of the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS) and was held on 4-6 September 2012 in Wroclaw, Poland.

Papers published in this special issue have been selected to demonstrate, on the one hand, an overview of the conference topics and, on the other hand, to document the most important advances in numerical heat transfer. The special issue consists of twelve papers.