The work aims to improve the control performance of tension control system of rewinder in the papermaking industry and the product quality and reliability, and eliminate the chattering phenomenon of traditional reaching law method. An improved adaptive reaching law method was proposed, based on which a rewinder tension control system based on sliding-model control algorithm was put forward. Compared with traditional PID control algorithm, the comparative analysis on the simulation results showed that the proposed sliding-model control algorithm had better dynamic property. Such algorithm has a lot of good control advantages, such as fast dynamic response and strong anti-disturbance capability.