In the waste heat recovery process, heat source temperature control and thermal management are always required to ensure safety and high efficiency of the waste heat recovery system. To this aim, the conventional method is to establish a series of independent heat transfer units and adopt a complex control strategy, which makes the system very complex and only applicable for a specific object. The concept of "integrated thermal management controller" (ITMC) is presented in this work to provide a novel method to solve the above problems. A two-dimensional heat and mass transfer model is developed to analyze and predict the operation performance of the ITMC. The numerical analysis indicates good heat source temperature control and thermal management performance of the ITMC. In addition, an experimental prototype is established, and test data are presented, which agree well with the numerical results and verify the correctness of the model. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.