2Dust development was motivated by the recent increasing availability of high-resolution images of circumstellar dust shells at various wavelengths, especially in the mid-IR ranges (N and Q bands). The code solves the equation of radiative transfer following the principle of long characteristic in a 2-D polar grid, while considering a 3-D radiation field at each grid point. A solution is sought through an iterative scheme in which self-consistency of the solution is achieved by requiring a global luminosity constancy throughout the shell.

The main focus of the code is to obtain insights on:

1. the global energetics of dust grains in the shell
2. the 2-D projected morphologies of the shell that are strongly dependent on the mixed effects of the axisymmetric dust distribution and inclination angle.

We've allowed sufficient flexibility so that the code can be used to model a variety of axisymmetric astronomical dust systems. For example, users can use his/her own density distribution function as a fortran function (see an example from Ueta & Meixner 2003). Also, the dust opacities are calculated through Mie theory from the user-given size distribution and optical constants (as "n & k" values) of the dust grains.

The 2-Dust code developement was supported by NSF Career Award grant AST 97-33697