AbstractAiming at the difficulty of temperature control and disturbance rejection control in wave rotor refrigeration process (WRRP), a novel whale optimization two‐degree‐of‐freedom (2DOF) Smith predictor based on feedforward compensation method (WO‐2DOFSP‐FC) is proposed. Firstly, the obtained test data of the WRRP are used for system identification and the approximate second‐order model with time‐delay is obtained by using the suboptimal reduction algorithm. This procedure also yields a first‐order model of the disturbance. Then, the whale optimization 2DOF Smith predictor based on feedforward compensation (2DOFSP‐FC) method is proposed. This proposed method improves the 2DOFSP and introduces feedforward compensation control to reduce the influence of the measurable disturbance on the temperature control system. In addition, the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) is proposed to optimally tune the 2DOFSP‐FC controller parameters. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed WO‐2DOFSP‐FC method can make the controlled system have good characteristics of both set value tracking and disturbance rejection.