Surface roughness in finite element meshes

Abstract: We present a practical approach for constructing meshes of general rough surfaces with given autocorrelation functions based on the unstructured meshes of nominally smooth surfaces. The approach builds on a well-known method to construct correlated random numbers from white noise using a decomposition of the autocorrelation matrix. We discuss important details arising in practical applications to the physicalmodeling of surface roughness and provide a software implementation to enable use of the approach with a broad range of numerical methods in various fields of science and engineering.