Friction is a dominant nonlinear factor in servomechanisms, which seriously deteriorates system accuracy. A friction compensator is indispensable to fabricate high-performance servomechanisms. In order to compensate for the friction in the servomechanism, identification of the friction elements is required. To estimate the friction of the servomechanism, an accurate linear element model of the system is required first. Tn this paper, a nonlinear friction model, in which static, coulomb and viscous frictions as well as Stribeck effect are included, is identified through the describing function approximation of the nonlinear element. A nonlinear element composed of two relays is intentionally devised to induce various limit cycle conditions in the velocity control loop of the servomechanism. The friction coefficients are estimated from the intersection points of the linear and nonlinear elements in the complex plane. A Butterworth filter is added to the velocity control loop not only to meet the assumption of the harmonic balance method but also to improve the accuracy of the friction identification process. Validity of the proposed method is confirmed through numerical simulations and experiments. In addition, a model-based friction compensator is applied as a feedforward controller to compensate fur the nonlinear characteristics of the servomechanism and to verify the effectiveness of the proposed identification method.