TriPoD: Tri-Population size distributions for Dust evolution

Coagulation in vertically integrated hydrodynamic simulations of protoplanetary disks

¹ University Observatory, Faculty of Physics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Scheinerstr. 1, 81679 Munich, Germany
² Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
³ Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute, 162 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
⁴ Exzellenzcluster ORIGINS, Boltzmannstr. 2, 85748 Garching, Germany

^★ Corresponding author; tpfeil@flatironinstitute.org

Received: 24 January 2024
Accepted: 4 September 2024

Abstract

Context. Dust coagulation and fragmentation impact the structure and evolution of protoplanetary disks and set the initial conditions for planet formation. Dust grains dominate the opacities, they determine the cooling times of the gas via thermal accommodation in collisions, they influence the ionization state of the gas, and the available grain surface area is an important parameter for the chemistry in protoplanetary disks. Therefore, dust evolution is an effect that should not be ignored in numerical studies of protoplanetary disks. Available dust coagulation models are, however, too computationally expensive to be implemented in large-scale hydrodynamic simulations. This limits detailed numerical studies of protoplanetary disks, including these effects, mostly to one-dimensional models.

Aims. We aim to develop a simple – yet accurate – dust coagulation model that can be easily implemented in hydrodynamic simulations of protoplanetary disks. Our model shall not significantly increase the computational cost of simulations and provide information about the local grain size distribution.

Methods. The local dust size distributions are assumed to be truncated power laws. Such distributions can be fully characterized by only two dust fluids (large and small grains) and a maximum particle size, truncating the power law. We compare our model to state- of-the-art dust coagulation simulations and calibrate it to achieve a good fit with these sophisticated numerical methods.

Results. Running various parameter studies, we achieved a good fit between our simplified three-parameter model and DustPy, a state-of-the-art dust coagulation software.

Conclusions. We present TriPoD, a sub-grid dust coagulation model for the PLUTO code. With TriPoD, we can perform twodimensional, vertically integrated dust coagulation simulations on top of a hydrodynamic simulation. Studying the dust distributions in two-dimensional vortices and planet-disk systems is thus made possible.