A detailed framework to incorporate dust in hydrodynamical simulations

Abstract

Dust plays a key role in the evolution of the interstellar medium and its correct modelling in numerical simulations is therefore fundamental. We present a new and self-consistent model that treats grain thermal coupling with the gas, radiation balance, and surface chemistry for molecular hydrogen self-consistently. This method can be applied to any dust distribution with an arbitrary number of grain types without affecting the overall computational cost. In this paper, we describe in detail the physics and the algorithm behind our approach, and in order to test the methodology, we present some examples of astrophysical interest, namely (i) a one-zone collapse with complete gas chemistry and thermochemical processes, (ii) a 3D model of a low-metallicity collapse of a minihalo starting from cosmological initial conditions, and (iii) a turbulent molecular cloud with H-C-O chemistry (277 reactions), together with self-consistent cooling and heating solved on the fly. Although these examples employ the publicly available code KROME, our approach can easily be integrated into any computational framework.