Abstract The VIENNA rectifier has long been used in applications such as charging piles, and the theoretical research on its control strategy is enumerated. Compared with other circuit components, the VIENNA rectifier has fewer power components and a higher power factor, so it is applied to more application scenarios. The traditional PI control has a long start-up response time and a high overshoot, while the sliding mode control (SMC) has excellent control performance for nonlinear systems. In my article, the control mode of the VIENNA rectifier is analyzed mathematically, SMC takes controls of the current inner loop, and a new exponential reaching rate is put forward the at first improve the control process. Finally, a complete system simulation model is built to prove the superiority of the VIENNA rectifier based on an optimized SMC control strategy for each control target and the corresponding control strategy. The results show that the control effect is obviously optimized by using this method.