Numerical simulations have been carried out to investigate the heat transfer enhancement for fluid flow in a pipe partially filled with porous media. The new axisymmetric lattice Boltzmann model is used to calculate the fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics in a pipe filled with porous media. The proposed algorithm is implemented on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) using NVIDIA's CUDA for a high calculating speed. Finally, the effects of several parameters, such as porous layer thickness, Darcy number and porosity, on thermal conductivity efficiency are investigated. It is found that controlling the thickness of the porous media can significantly improve heat transfer performance and the influence of porosity is very small both on flow field and temperature field when other parameters are fixed. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.