2024/04/18 by Maxime Lombart, Lombart, Maxime, Charles-Édouard Bréhier +5
Engineering · #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) #FOS: Physical sciences #Soil and Unsaturated Flow #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2404.11851
openalex publication_date 2024/04/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Dust grains play a significant role in several astrophysical processes, including gas/dust dynamics, chemical reactions, and radiative transfer. Replenishment of small-grain populations is mainly governed by fragmentation during pair-wise collisions between grains. The wide spectrum of fragmentation outcomes, from complete disruption to erosion and/or mass transfer, can be modelled by the general non-linear fragmentation equation. Efficiently solving this equation is crucial for an accurate treatment of the dust fragmentation in numerical modelling. However, similar to dust coagulation, numerical errors in current fragmentation algorithms employed in astrophysics are dominated by the numerical over-diffusion problem -- particularly in 3D hydrodynamic simulations where the discrete resolution of the mass density distribution tends to be highly limited. With this in mind, we have derived the first conservative form of the general non-linear fragmentation with a mass flux highlighting the mass transfer phenomenon. Then, to address cases of limited mass density resolution, we applied a high-order discontinuous Galerkin scheme to efficiently solve the conservative fragmentation equation with a reduced number of dust bins. An accuracy of 0.1 -1% is reached with 20 dust bins spanning a mass range of 9 orders of magnitude.