Abstract The numerical study of direct heat conduction through thin film heat flux gauge is carried out to see how closely it resembles with short duration experimental thermal data. The thermal data obtained from transient impulse facilities at Von Karman Institute, Belgium (case1) and Oxford University (case2) is taken from literature as a reference for validation purpose. The numerically simulated temperature data is compared with experimental data. A good agreement is observed. Further, heat flux is recovered from temperature data using the cubic spline technique for comparative study. The peak deviation from experimental heat flux data for case 1 and 2 is found to be 6% and 7.2% respectively. All these deviations are in the acceptable range of 8%. This deviation is also accounted by the fact that direct heat condition modelling is used instead of numerical modelling of impulse facilities. Thus, direct heat conduction modelling is acceptable approach to predict the transient thermal data with admissible errors.