Increasing the heat transfer from premixed laminar oxy-fuel flames to glass or quartz products is of major importance in the lighting industry. In this paper a laminar flame of hydrogen + oxygen is used as an impinging jet in a stagnation-flow-like configuration to investigate the heating of a glass product. The research was intended to analyze the crucial phenomena determining the heat transfer rate. The time scales of the processes taking place in the flame, the stagnation boundary layer, and the plate are quantified and from this it is shown that these zones can be decoupled. It will also be shown that, as a result, the heat flux entering the plate depends only on the stagnation flow and the plate's surface temperature. Two cases were studied. In one case the stagnation boundary layer consisting of a burnt and chemically frozen mixture of hydrogen + oxygen or hydrogen + air is studied. In the other case the flow is reactive in the stagnation boundary layer. An analytical approximation for the heat transfer coefficient is derived for the case without a viscous sublayer. The effect of strain rate on the heat transfer coefficients is incorporated in this model. This heat transfer coefficient is compared to numerically calculated heat transfer coefficients for stagnation flows with both reactive and nonreactive boundary layers. Furthermore, it is shown that the stagnation boundary layer is not in chemical equilibrium. First numerical results indicate that surface chemistry can be expected to contribute significantly to the heating process. Surface chemistry is studied numerically by assuming a quartz plate coated with a platinum layer. (C) 2004 Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of The Combustion Institute.