The influence of planar confining walls on the steady forced convection heat transfer from a cylinder to power-law fluids has been investigated numerically by solving the field equations using FLUENT (version 6.2). Extensive results highlighting the effects of the Reynolds number (1 ≤ Re ≤ 40), power-law index (0.2 ≤ n ≤ 1.8), Prandtl number (1 ≤ Pr ≤ 100) and the blockage ratio (β = 4 and 1.6) on the average Nusselt number have been presented. For a fixed value of the blockage ratio, the heat transfer is enhanced with the increasing degree of shear-thinning behaviour of the fluid, while an opposite trend was observed in shear-thickening fluids. Due to the modifications of the flow and temperature fields close to the cylinder, the closely placed walls (i.e., decreasing value of the blockage ratio) further enhance the rate of heat transfer as the fluid behaviour changes from Newtonian to shear-thickening fluids (n > 1), the opposite influence is seen with the decreasing value of the flow behaviour index (n) in shear-thinning (n < 1) fluids. Finally, the functional dependence of the present numerical results on the relevant dimensionless parameters has been presented in the form of closure relationships for their easy use in a new application. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.