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Developing a non-Newtonian fluid model for dust, for application to astrophysical flows

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2024

Elliot M. Lynch*
Affiliation:
Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, UMR5574, Univ Lyon, Univ Lyon1, Ens de Lyon, CNRS, F-69230 Saint-Genis-Laval, France
Guillaume Laibe
Affiliation:
Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, UMR5574, Univ Lyon, Univ Lyon1, Ens de Lyon, CNRS, F-69230 Saint-Genis-Laval, France
*
†Email address for correspondence: elliot.lynch@ens-lyon.fr

Abstract

In the astrophysics community it is common practice to model collisionless dust, entrained in a gas flow, as a pressureless fluid. However, a pressureless fluid is fundamentally different from a collisionless fluid – the latter of which generically possess a non-zero anisotropic pressure or stress tensor. In this paper we derive a fluid model for collisionless dust, entrained in a turbulent gas, starting from the equations describing the motion of individual dust grains. We adopt a covariant formulation of our model to allow for the geometry and coordinate systems prevalent in astrophysics, and provide a closure valid for the accretion disc context. We show that the continuum mechanics properties of a dust fluid corresponds to a higher-dimensional anisotropic Maxwell fluid, after the extra dimensions are averaged out, with a dynamically important rheological stress tensor. This higher-dimensional treatment has the advantage of keeping the dust velocity and velocity of the fluid seen, and their respective moments, on the same footing. This results in a simplification of the constitutive relation describing the evolution of the dust rheological stress.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Figure 0

Figure 1. Horizontal stress tensor components in a rotating shear flow, as a function of ${St}$ and $A/\varOmega$, with different dimensionless correlation times.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Locations in the parameter space of zeros of the stress tensor components, indicating a lack of steady solutions. Black solid line: $\tau _c=10^{-3}$, black dashed line: $\tau _c=10^{-2}$, black dotted line: $\tau _c=10^{-2}$, blue solid line: $\tau _c=1$, blue dashed line: $\tau _c=10^{3}$. The region of the parameter space above these lines contains no (physical) steady solutions.

Figure 2

Figure 3. Horizontal stress tensor components for a fluid with a dimensionless correlation time, $\tau _c = 1$. (a) A Rayleigh stable Keplerian shear flow where $\varOmega \propto R^{-3/2}$ ($A = \frac {3}{4} \varOmega$). (b) Rayleigh unstable shear flow with $A = 1.1 \varOmega$. The gas Reynolds stress for these two cases is shown in figure 7 in Appendix A.3. For the Keplerian shear flow, the rheological stress tensor becomes increasingly anisotropic as the Stokes number increases. In the Rayleigh unstable case there is a maximum Stokes number above which the fluid dust description breaks down as the constitutive equation becomes thermally unstable.

Figure 3

Figure 4. Illustration of the directional dependence of the P-wave velocity at different Stokes numbers for the disc considered in figure 3. The distance from the origin is proportional to the wavespeed of the P wave, while the angle to the $x$ axis is the direction of propagation. The axes are aligned such that the $x$ axis is directed in the radial direction, while the $y$ axis points in the direction of the fluid motion. On this figure the sound wave in the gas would be a circle of unit radius. For the Keplerian shear flow, the P waves slow down and preferentially propagate radially as the Stokes number increases. For the Rayleigh unstable flow, the P-wave velocity is highly anisotropic, up to the breakdown in the fluid description where there is no longer a steady background on which the P wave can propagate.

Figure 4

Figure 5. Density plots for the rotating shear flow, (a) constant density flow, (b) steady-state accretion flow. Both are for Keplerian shear flows, solved with the HLL solver with $\tau _c=0.1$. The dashed line indicates the initial density profile, while the solid black line shows the final density profile. Grey lines show the evolution of the density profile, spaced every 100 inner orbits (a) and every 200 inner orbits (b).

Figure 5

Figure 6. Diagonal dust stress components for the flows considered in figure 5. Full colour lines are the simulation, while greyed out/transparent lines are the solutions from § 7.1. These are closer in the inner disc where the velocity is closer to Keplerian motion. The outer disc in the constant gas density case is still far from the steady-state profile.

Figure 6

Figure 7. Reynolds stress components (in units of $\alpha c_s^2$) for two different rotating shear flows. The left is for the Rayleigh stable, circular Keplerian rotational profile where $\varOmega \propto R^{-3/2}$. Here the Reynolds stress becomes increasingly anisotropic as $\tau _c$ increases, although the cross-term $R_{R \phi }$ is maximum near $\tau _c = 1$. The right is for a marginally Rayleigh unstable flow where $A = 1.1 \varOmega$. Here we see that the Reynolds stress diverges as $\tau _c \rightarrow \sqrt {5/2}$, where the moment expansion used to derive the turbulent stress model breaks down.

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