A Two-Population Dust Evolution Model for 3D Hydrodynamics Simulations of Protoplanetary Disks

Various processes in protoplanetary disks are tightly coupled to the evolution of their dust component. Grain growth, drift, and fragmentation are the first steps towards planetesimal formation via the streaming instability; they determine the dust opacity and, thus, change the system’s appearance in the dust continuum emission. Furthermore, chemical reactions are facilitated on grain surfaces, making the available grain surface area an important parameter for disk chemistry. Modeling of the grain size evolution is thus indispensable for many numerical studies of planet-forming disks and the interpretation of observational data.

Based on a two-population approach, we are currently developing a computationally inexpensive dust evolution sub-grid model for hydrodynamics simulations with the PLUTO code. Once testing of the two-dimensional version of the model has been finished, it will enable us to set-up large parameter studies of dust evolution in planet-disk systems, which were not feasible so far. As a next step, three-dimensional simulations with dust evolution will follow.

Here, we present first results of one- and two-dimensional test simulations of circumstellar disks, with our novel dust evolution prescription. We have already benchmarked these results against full-coagulation simulations with DustPy (Stammler & Birnstiel, in prep.) and a planet-disk simulation with LA-COMPASS (Drążkowska et al., 2019) with promising results.

Fig. 1: Comparison of the dust size distribution evolution of a 1D, full-coagulation simulation of a protoplanetary disk (with DustPy, top row) and our new two-population model for the PLUTO code. The size distribution of the full-coagulation model is well reproduced in all phases of the simulation.

Fig. 2: Planet-disk simulation with our two-population model for the PLUTO code. Dust column densities and peak particle sizes agree well with the full-coagulation simulation by Drążkowska et al. (2019).