Analysis of Methods for Computing the Trajectories of Dust Particles in a Gas–Dust Circumstellar Disk

A systematic analysis ofmethods for computing the trajectories of solid-phase particles applied in modern astrophysics codes designed for modeling gas–dust circumstellar disks has been carried out for the first time. Themotion of grains whose velocities are determinedmainly by the gas drag, that is, for which the stopping time or relaxation time for the velocity of the dust to the velocity of the gas t stop is less than or comparable to the rotation period, are considered. The methods are analyzed from the point of view of their suitability for computing the motions of small bodies, including dust grains less than 1 μ m in size, which are strongly coupled to the gas. Two test problems are with analytical solutions. Fast first order accurate methods that make it possible to avoid additional restrictions on the time step size τ due to gas drag in computations of the motion of grains of any size are presented. For the conditions of a circumstellar disk, the error in the velocity computations obtained when using some stable methods becomes unacceptably large when the time step size is τ > t stop . For the radial migration of bodies that exhibit drifts along nearly Keplerian orbits, an asymptotic approximation, sometimes called the short friction time approximation or drift flux model, gives a relative error for the radial-velocity computations equals to St 2 , where St is the Stokes number, the ratio of the stopping time of the body to some fraction of the rotation period (dynamical time scale) in the disk.