Formation of dust grains in the winds of cool giants, PhD thesis 1992

Abstract

Interstellar dust forms during stellar mass-loss events, occurring either during a star's giant phase or during supernova explosions. This PhD thesis provides an in-depth investigation into the theory of dust condensation and growth, specifically applied to the winds of cool giants such as Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars. The thesis begins with a theoretical description of the chemical reactions that initiate seed formation within a cooling flow. It then details an efficient mechanism - a moment method based on size-weighted moments of the grain size distribution - to compute dust evolution during growth. This theoretical framework is applied to dust-driven winds from carbon-rich AGB stars. By deriving wind equations and self-consistently incorporating dust formation, the research demonstrates that radiation pressure on dust forming in the expanding atmosphere can drive a stellar wind. Furthermore, a parameter study covering the giant region of the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram is used to derive mass-loss formulas for these winds. The final chapter expands the dust formation theory to investigate the condensation of heterogeneous grains.

This thesis was not publicly available yet in electronic form, but I think it should be. I have scanned the physical book and hope it can be hosted by arXiv. The file size is 62MB because it is a scanned 124-page document. It is already optimized for size (the direct scan was more than 600MB). https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1992PhDT.......142D/abstract