Dusty gas with SPH - II. Implicit timestepping and astrophysical drag regimes

TL;DR

This paper introduces an implicit timestepping algorithm for SPH simulations of dust-gas mixtures that conserves momentum, handles complex drag regimes, and is significantly faster than explicit methods in relevant regimes.

Contribution

It develops an implicit, momentum-conserving timestepping scheme for SPH dust-gas simulations that accurately handles non-linear drag regimes and improves computational efficiency.

Findings

Implicit scheme is 1-10 times faster than explicit methods for certain timestep ratios.

The algorithm accurately models both linear and non-linear astrophysical drag regimes.

Benchmark tests confirm the scheme's robustness and efficiency.

Abstract

In a companion paper (Laibe & Price 2011b), we have presented an algorithm for simulating two-fluid gas and dust mixtures in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). In this paper, we develop an implicit timestepping method that preserves the exact conservation of the both linear and angular momentum in the underlying SPH algorithm, but unlike previous schemes, allows the iterations to converge to arbitrary accuracy and is suited to the treatment of non- linear drag regimes. The algorithm presented in Paper I is also extended to deal with realistic astrophysical drag regimes, including both linear and non-linear Epstein and Stokes drag. The scheme is benchmarked against the test suite presented in Paper I, including i) the analytic solutions of the dustybox problem and ii) solutions of the dustywave, dustyshock, dustysedov and dustydisc obtained with explicit timestepping. We find that the implicit method is 1- 10 times faster than the explicit temporal integration when the ratio r between the the timestep and the drag stopping time is 1 < r < 1000.