  Recent years have witnessed the development of so-called relaxation
tribometers, the free oscillation of which is altered by the presence of
frictional stresses within the contact. So far, analysis of such oscillations
has been restricted to the shape of their decaying envelope, to identify in
particular solid or viscous friction components. Here, we present a more
general expression of the forces possibly acting within the contact , and
retain six possible, physically relevant terms. Two of them, which had never
been proposed in the context of relaxation tribometry, only affect the
oscillation frequency, not the amplitude of the signal. We demonstrate that
each of those six terms has a unique signature in the time-evolution of the
oscillation, which allows efficient identification of their respective weights
in any experimental signal. We illustrate our methodology on a PDMS
sphere/glass plate torsional contact.
