Gas Interaction with Porous Fluffy Dust Aggregates

This project models how gas in protoplanetary disks interacts with porous, fluffy dust aggregates, investigating how porosity and structure affect drag forces, collision outcomes, and grain growth rates during the earliest stages of planet formation. Understanding these interactions is essential for explaining how micrometer-sized dust grains grow into the kilometer-scale planetesimals that eventually become planets.

Principal Investigators: Yun Zhang, Fred Adams