TriPoD: Tri-Population size distributions for Dust evolution. Coagulation in vertically integrated hydrodynamic simulations of protoplanetary disks

TL;DR

TriPoD is a computationally efficient dust coagulation model that accurately predicts dust size distributions in protoplanetary disks, enabling detailed 2D hydrodynamic simulations including dust evolution effects.

Contribution

We developed TriPoD, a simple yet accurate dust coagulation model that integrates into hydrodynamic simulations without significant computational overhead.

Findings

TriPoD accurately fits DustPy simulations across various parameters.

It enables 2D dust coagulation modeling in hydrodynamic codes.

The model facilitates studies of dust in vortices and planet-disk interactions.

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, they influence the ionization state of the gas, and the grain surface area is an important parameter for the chemistry in protoplanetary disks. Therefore, dust evolution 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 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 characterized by 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 two-dimensional, 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.