The objective of this article is to study the estimation of an overall heat transfer coefficient in a partially filled rotating cylinder. Herein is an inverse analysis for estimating the overall heat transfer coefficient in an arbitrary cross-section of the aforementioned system from the temperatures measured on the shell. The material employs the finite-volume method to solve the direct problem. The hybrid effective algorithm applied here contains the local optimization algorithm to estimate the unknown parameter by minimizing the objective function. The data measured here are simulated by adding random errors to the exact solution. An investigation is made of the impact of the measurement errors on the accuracy of the inverse analysis. Two-optimization algorithms in determining the overall heat transfer coefficient are used. It is determined that the Conjugate Gradient Method is better than the Levenberg-Marquardt Method because the former produces greater accuracy for the same measurement errors. The resulting observation indicates that good agreement exists between the exact value and estimated result for both algorithms.