The noise generated by the friction of two rough surfaces under weak contact pressure is usually called roughness noise. The underlying vibration which produces the noise stems from numerous instantaneous shocks (in the microsecond range) between surface micro-asperities. The numerical simulation of this problem using classical mechanics requires a fine discretization in both space and time. This is why the finite element method takes much CPU time. In this study, we propose an alternative numerical approach which is based on a truncated modal decomposition of the vibration, a central difference integration scheme and two algorithms for contact: The penalty algorithm and the Lagrange multiplier algorithm. Not only does it reproduce the empirical laws of vibration level versus roughness and sliding speed found experimentally but it also provides the statistical properties of local events which are not accessible by experiment. The CPU time reduction is typically a factor of 10.
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