A detailed framework to incorporate dust in hydrodynamical simulations

Understand

Dust plays a key role in the evolution of the ISM 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.
• 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.