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.
@article{arxiv.2002.00894,
title = {Surface roughness in finite element meshes},
author = {Fabian Loth and Thomas Kiel and Kurt Busch and Philip T. Kristensen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.00894},
year = {2020}
}