A new approach to surface roughness characterization using geostatistics

The role that surface roughness characteristics play to anticorrosive protection and duration of coating is critical. For the characterization of surface roughness, a number of parameters are employed such as the amplitude parameters Ra and Rp. Using conventional statistical analysis, the latter cannot yield information about the spatial distribution of the irregularities and thus the homogeneity of the surface. In this paper, a new approach is developed using geostatistics to account for the location of each roughness measurement point and to produce a variogram function for each roughness parameter. This function, which is characteristic for a given surface, provides important information about the spatial distribution of the surface irregularities. Finally, an application example is presented to validate the above.