This study investigates flame propagation in small thermally-participating tubes where the wall acts as a heat-recirculating medium. This fundamental configuration allows heat in the combustion products to be recirculated into the reactants, resulting in excess enthalpy and enhanced burning rates. Preheating of the reactants by heat recirculation has traditionally been considered to be the dominant mechanism leading to large burning rates observed in such systems. This is mainly supported by results from physical models based on a one-dimensional (1-D) representation of the system, where the radial diffusion of heat from wall surface to channel centerline is not accurately captured. In this study, a 2-D formulation with conjugate heat transfer, which accurately resolves the transport of heat inside the gas-wall system, is used to model the excess-enthalpy phenomenon. Steadily-propagating stoichiometric methane-air flames are simulated inside an adiabatic tube of finite wall-thickness, over a wide range of inlet flow velocities and small tube diameters. Burning-rate enhancement is found to be caused not only by preheating, associated with heat recirculation, but also by an increase in flame-front area. Flame elongation is more pronounced with increasing tube diameter and inlet velocity, up to a point where the change in flame-front area becomes dominant in enhancing burning rate. In that case, heat recirculation is a necessary condition for flames to couple to the thermal wave in the wall and elongate, but does not provide a significant increase in enthalpy or temperature that would otherwise be needed for high burning rates to be observed. As the diameter is reduced, the effect of preheating becomes increasingly important for burning-rate enhancement compared to flame area increase. At very small diameters, smaller than the flame thickness, the increase in burning rate is seen to be predominantly attributable to preheating. However, preheating is seen to become limited as inflow velocity is increased, due to 2-D effects inside the fluid that interfere with heat recirculation. These findings demonstrate that 2-D effects inside the fluid can have a prohibitive influence on the burning-rate enhancement attributed to preheating, but that they also give rise to an additional mechanism, associated with the change in flame surface area, responsible for burning-rate enhancement in heat-recirculating burners. (C) 2014 The Combustion Institute. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.