English

A fast and explicit algorithm for simulating the dynamics of small dust grains with smoothed particle hydrodynamics

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2015-09-11 v3 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We describe a simple method for simulating the dynamics of small grains in a dusty gas, relevant to micron-sized grains in the interstellar medium and grains of centimetre size and smaller in protoplanetary discs. The method involves solving one extra diffusion equation for the dust fraction in addition to the usual equations of hydrodynamics. This "diffusion approximation for dust" is valid when the dust stopping time is smaller than the computational timestep. We present a numerical implementation using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) that is conservative, accurate and fast. It does not require any implicit timestepping and can be straightforwardly ported into existing 3D codes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1505.00969,
  title  = {A fast and explicit algorithm for simulating the dynamics of small dust grains with smoothed particle hydrodynamics},
  author = {Daniel J. Price and Guillaume Laibe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.00969},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

15 pages, 10 figures, accepted to MNRAS. Code implementation (ndspmhd v2.1) and setup of test problems available at: http://users.monash.edu.au/~dprice/ndspmhd/. v3: sign errors fixed as per erratum to published paper

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:28:18.065Z