Dynamics of dust grains in turbulent molecular clouds. Conditions for decoupling and limits of different numerical implementations

Abstract

Dust grain dynamics in molecular clouds is regulated by its interplay with supersonic turbulent gas motions. The conditions under which dust grains decouple from the dynamics of gas remain poorly constrained. We first aim to investigate the critical dust grain size for dynamical decoupling, using both analytical predictions and numerical experiments. Second, we aim to set the range of validity of two fundamentally different numerical implementations for the evolution of dust and gas mixtures in turbulent molecular clouds. We carried out a suite of numerical experiments using two different schemes. First, we used a monofluid formalism in the terminal velocity approximation (TVA) on a Eulerian grid. Second, we used a two-fluid scheme, in which the dust dynamics is handled with Lagrangian super-particles, and the gas dynamics on a Eulerian grid. The monofluid results are in good agreement with the theoretical critical size for decoupling. We report dust dynamics decoupling for Stokes number St>0.1, that is, dust grains of $s>4\mu$m in size. We find that the TVA is well suited for grain sizes of 10 $\mu$m in molecular clouds, in particular in the densest regions. However, the maximum dust enrichment measured in the low-density material where St>1 is questionable. In the Lagrangian dust experiments, we show that the results are affected by the numerics for all dust grain sizes. At St<<1, the dust dynamics is largely affected by artificial trapping in the high-density regions, leading to spurious variations of the dust concentration. At St>1, the maximum dust enrichment is regulated by the grid resolution used for the gas dynamics. The results of previous similar numerical work should therefore be revisited with respect to the limitations we highlight in this study. Dust enrichment of submicron dust grains is unlikely to occur in the densest parts of molecular clouds.

22 pages, 16 figures, accepted for publication in A&A

References in corpus (13)

• SPLASH: An interactive visualisation tool for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations
• Numerical simulations of compressively driven interstellar turbulence: I. Isothermal gas
• Magnetic field amplification in turbulent astrophysical plasmas
• Low dust emissivities and radial variations in the envelopes of Class 0 protostars: a signature of early grain growth?
• Submillimeter and Far-Infrared Polarimetric Observations of Magnetic Fields in Star-Forming Regions
• Dust and gas mixtures with multiple grain species - a one-fluid approach
• Is the dust-to-gas ratio constant in molecular clouds?
• "Ash-fall" induced by molecular outflow in protostar evolution
• Protostellar collapse: the conditions to form dust rich protoplanetary disks
• On the dynamics of dust during protostellar collapse
• Protostellar collapse: A comparison between SPH and AMR calculations
• Small dust grain dynamics on adaptive mesh-refinement grids. I. Methods
• Small-scale clustering of nano-dust grains in supersonic turbulence