In this paper, a new analytical model is presented to investigate the heat transfer performance of sandwich metallic honeycomb structures under the forced convection conditions. The new method overcomes the approximations in the corrugated wall model (also called the modified fin analogy model), the heat transfer efficiency predicted by this new method is consistently lower than that predicted by the corrugated wall model and is higher than that by the effective medium model. Compared with the corrugated wall model and the effective medium model, the new method gives the results closer to the numerical simulation results, which indicates that the method is accurate. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.