This study presents an exact analytical solution of transient heat conduction in cylindrical multilayer composite laminates. This solution is valid for the most generalized linear boundary conditions consisting of the conduction, convection and radiation heat transfer. Here, it is supposed that the fibers are winded around the cylinder and their direction can be changed in each lamina. Laplace transformation is applied to change the domain of the solutions from time into the frequency. An appropriate Fourier transformation has been derived using the Sturm-Liouville theorem. Here, a set of equations for Fourier coefficients are obtained based on the boundary conditions both inside and outside the cylinder, and the continuity of temperature and heat flux at boundaries between adjacent layers. The exact solution of this set of equations is obtained using Thomas algorithm and Fourier coefficients are expressed by recessive relations. Due to the difficulty of applying the inverse Laplace transformation, the Meromorphic function method is utilized to find the transient temperature distribution in laminate. Some industrial examples are presented to investigate the ability of current solution for solving the wide range of applied steady and unsteady problems. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.