A periodic CFD approach for the performance analysis of compact high temperature heat exchangers is introduced and applied to selected benchmark problems, which are a fully developed 2D laminar heat transfer, a conjugate heat transfer between parallel plates which have exact solutions, and a heat transfer in a real high temperature heat exchanger module. The results for the 2D laminar heat transfer and the 2D conjugate heat transfer showed a very good agreement with the exact solutions. For the high temperature heat exchanger module, the pressure drops were predicted well but some difference was observed in the temperature parameters when compared to the full channel CFD analysis due to assumptions introduced into the periodic approach. Considering its assumptions and simplicities, however, the results showed that the periodic approach provides physically reasonable results and it is sufficient to predict the performance of a heat exchanger within an engineering margin and with much less CPU time than the case of a full channel analysis.