Turbulence-Induced Relative Velocity of Dust particles IV: the Collision Kernel

Abstract

Motivated by its importance for modeling dust particle growth in protoplanetary disks, we study turbulence-induced collision statistics of inertial particles as a function of the particle friction time, tau_p. We show that turbulent clustering significantly enhances the collision rate for particles of similar sizes with tau_p corresponding to the inertial range of the flow. If the friction time, tau_p,h, of the larger particle is in the inertial range, the collision kernel per unit cross section increases with increasing friction time, tau_p,l, of the smaller particle, and reaches the maximum at tau_p,l = tau_p,h, where the clustering effect peaks. This feature is not captured by the commonly-used kernel formula, which neglects the effect of clustering. We argue that turbulent clustering helps alleviate the bouncing barrier problem for planetesimal formation. We also investigate the collision velocity statistics using a collision-rate weighting factor to account for higher collision frequency for particle pairs with larger relative velocity. For tau_p,h in the inertial range, the rms relative velocity with collision-rate weighting is found to be invariant with tau_p,l and scales with tau_p,h roughly as ~ tau_p,h^(1/2). The weighting factor favors collisions with larger relative velocity, and including it leads to more destructive and less sticking collisions. We compare two collision kernel formulations based on spherical and cylindrical geometries. The two formulations give consistent results for the collision rate and the collision-rate weighted statistics, except that the spherical formulation predicts more head-on collisions than the cylindrical formulation.