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:
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 |