Abstract: A method of estimating the thermal properties from the transient experiment based on the solution of the nonlinear inverse problem of parameter estimation by using the Levenberg-Marquardt iterative procedure was presented. In the application of the inverse method a one-dimensional unsteady heat conduction problem was used and simulated “measured” transient temperature data were generated by adding uniform random errors to the computed exact temperature. Temperature independent and dependent thermal conductivity and volumetric heat capacity were respectively estimated by using the method.The results showed that the method was suitable for practical calculation of thermal properties based on general transient experimental techniques and for analysis of inverse heat conduction problems.It could also provide useful information to optimize the experiment.