Electro-hydraulic control systems are nonlinear in nature and their mathematic models have unknown parameters. Existing research of modeling and identification of the electro-hydraulic control system is mainly based on theoretical state space model, and the parameters identification is hard due to its demand on internal states measurement. Moreover, there are also some hard-to-model nonlinearities in theoretical model, which needs to be overcome. Modeling and identification of the electro-hydraulic control system of an excavator arm based on block-oriented nonlinear（BONL） models is investigated. The nonlinear state space model of the system is built first, and field tests are carried out to reveal the nonlinear characteristics of the system. Based on the physic insight into the system, three BONL models are adopted to describe the highly nonlinear system. The Hammerstein model is composed of a two-segment polynomial nonlinearity followed by a linear dynamic subsystem. The Hammerstein-Wiener（H-W） model is represented by the Hammerstein model in cascade with another single polynomial nonlinearity. A novel Pseudo-Hammerstein-Wiener（P-H-W） model is developed by replacing the single polynomial of the H-W model by a non-smooth backlash function. The key term separation principle is applied to simplify the BONL models into linear-in-parameters struc^tres. Then, a modified recursive least square algorithm（MRLSA） with iterative estimation of internal variables is developed to identify the all the parameters simultaneously. The identification results demonstrate that the BONL models with two-segment polynomial nonlinearities are able to capture the system behavior, and the P-H-W model has the best prediction accuracy. Comparison experiments show that the velocity prediction error of the P-H-W model is reduced by 14%, 30% and 75% to the H-W model, Hammerstein model, and extended auto-regressive （ARX） model, respectively. This research is helpful in controller design, system monitoring and diagnosis.
