Abstract To effectively utilize waste heat resulted in industrial production processes, this study investigates the dynamic thermal management using phase change material (PCM) thermal storage technique for the heat recovery system. The heat transfer process of a tube-type PCM storage module is analyzed and the dynamic model is developed for the optimization of system operation. The flag to indicate different working modes of the storage module is introduced as a system decision variable, which is used in developing an intelligent algorithm adopting biogeography-based optimization method for dynamic control of the system. The effectiveness of the dynamic model is verified via real demonstration experimental tests and the maximum relative error is 5.47%. The validation of the algorithm and evaluation of the dynamic thermal management are carried out by applications in the heat recovery of the steel sintering process. The influences of phase change enthalpy on the system performance are further studied to highlight the role of latent heat in thermal management. Results show that the proportions of fuel consumed in the off, flat and high peak energy utilization sections are optimized from the original 1:6.95:21.71 to 1:2.57:7.02 through the peak shaving and the total consumption of fuel per day is decreased from 6.81 t to 6.34 t. When the phase change enthalpy is reduced from 103 kJ kg−1 to 1 kJ kg−1, the decrease of the energy recovered by the PCM modules leads to the additional 0.06 t fuel consumption per day.