Deduction of static surface roughness from complex excess attenuation.

Data for complex excess attenuation have been used to determine the effective surface admittance and hence characteristic roughness size of a surface comprising a random distribution of semi-cylindrical rods on an acoustically hard plane. The inversion for roughness size is based on a simplified boss model. The technique is shown to be effective to within 4%, up to a threshold roughness packing density of 32%, above which the interaction between scattering elements appears to exceed that allowed by the model.