A continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) is a typical example of chemical industrial equipment, whose dynamics represent an extensive class of second order nonlinear systems. It has been witnessed that designing a good control algorithm for the CSTR is very challenging due to the high complexity. The two difficult issues in CSTR control are state estimation and external disturbance attenuation. In general, in industrial process control a fast and robust response is essential. Driven by these challenging issues and desired performance, this paper proposes an output feedback terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) framework which is developed for CSTR, and can estimate the system states and stabilize the system output tracking error to zero in a finite time. The corresponding stability analysis is presented in terms of the Lyapunov method. Illustrative examples are demonstrated by using Matlab simulations to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. (C) 2014 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.