Including Dust Coagulation in Hydrodynamic Models of Protoplanetary Disks: Dust Evolution in the Vicinity of a Jupiter-mass Planet

Abstract: Dust growth is often neglected when building models of protoplanetary disks due to its complexity and computational expense. However, it does play a major role in shaping the evolution of protoplanetary dust and planet formation. In this paper, we present a numerical model coupling 2-D hydrodynamic evolution of a protoplanetary disk, including a Jupiter-mass planet, and dust coagulation. This is obtained by including multiple dust fluids in a single grid-based hydrodynamic simulation and solving the Smoluchowski equation for dust coagulation on top of solving for the hydrodynamic evolution. We find that fragmentation of dust aggregates trapped in a pressure bump outside of the planetary gap leads to an enhancement in density of small grains. We compare the results obtained from the full coagulation treatment to the commonly used, fixed dust size approach and to previously applied, less computationally intensive methods for including dust coagulation. We find that the full coagulation results cannot be reproduced using the fixed-size treatment, but some can be mimicked using a relatively simple method for estimating the characteristic dust size in every grid cell.