Flue gas from periodic furnaces with large temperature fluctuation is difficult to be recovered by regular heat exchangers. To recover that unstable waste heat, a temperature pre-rectifier (TPR) with honeycombed structure is developed to smooth down the temperature fluctuation by continuous heat storing and heat releasing. A three-dimensional model of TPR is constructed to analyze the heat transfer process. Temperature rectification rate &eta; is defined to quantify the smoothing-down effect of TPR on temperature fluctuation. The relative size <i>s</i>* as the ratio of hole size to inner wall thickness (i.e., <i>s</i>* &#61; <i>s/&delta;</i>), can be used to measure the capacity of heat release compared to that of heat storage. The quantity &eta; reaches the highest value when the relative size <i>s</i>* is 1.0, and is increased with dimensionless length <i>l</i>*. When <i>s</i>* &#61; 1.0, &eta; firstly rises and then drops with the increment of <i>s</i>. The peak value of &eta; can be achieved by an optimized hole size <i>s</i><sub>opt</sub>. The <i>s</i><sub>opt</sub> value increases exponentially with the inlet temperature fluctuation intensity. The TPR with segmented structure can enhance n with relatively short length. The three-segment structure with a proportion of 0.18:0.33:0.49 makes &eta; &#62; 0.947, which is recommended for application. Industrial experiments showed that the temperature fluctuation of flue gas can be rectified from 568-1709 K to 1089-1174 K (&eta; &#61; 0.926) by TPR, which verified that the TPR is an effective method for waste heat recovery from periodic flue gas.