2025/11/10 by Giovanni Tedeschi-Prades, Tedeschi-Prades, Giovanni, T. Birnstiel +7
Engineering · Mathematics · #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #Computational Fluid Dynamics and Aerodynamics #FOS: Physical sciences #Fluid Dynamics (physics.flu-dyn) #Gas Dynamics and Kinetic Theory #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Particle Dynamics in Fluid Flows #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.07562
openalex publication_date 2025/11/10 · openalex created_date 2025/11/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The integration of aerodynamic drag is a fundamental step in simulating dust dynamics in hydrodynamical simulations. We propose a novel integration scheme, designed to be compatible with Strang splitting techniques, which allows for the straightforward integration of external forces and hydrodynamic fluxes in general-purpose hydrodynamic simulation codes. Moreover, this solver leverages an analytical solution to the problem of drag acceleration, ensuring linear complexity even in cases with multiple dust grain sizes, as opposed to the cubic scaling of methods that require a matrix inversion step. This new General Implicit Runge-Kutta integrator (GIRK) is evaluated using standard benchmarks for dust dynamics such as DUSTYBOX, DUSTYWAVE, and DUSTYSHOCK. The results demonstrate not only the accuracy of the method but also the expected scalings in terms of accuracy, convergence to equilibrium, and execution time. GIRK can be easily implemented in hydrodynamical simulations alongside hydrodynamical steps and external forces, and is especially useful in simulations with a large number of dust grain sizes.