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P48 - Simulations of Giant Impacts: The Importance of High Resolution

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CEST
Climate, Weather and Earth Sciences
Chemistry and Materials
Computer Science, Machine Learning, and Applied Mathematics
Applied Social Sciences and Humanities
Engineering
Life Sciences
Physics
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Description

Giant impacts (GI) form the last stage of planet formation and play a key role in determining many aspects like the final structure of planetary systems and the masses and compositions of its constituents. A common choice for numerically solving the equations of motion is the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method. We present a new SPH code built on top of the modern gravity code pkdgrav3. The code uses the Fast Multipole Method (FMM) on a distributed binary tree to achieve O(N) scaling and is designed to use modern hardware (SIMD vectorization and GPU). Neighbor finding in SPH is done for a whole group of particles at once and is tightly coupled to the FMM tree code. It therefore preserves the O(N) scaling from the gravity code. A generalized Equation of State (EOS) interface allows the use of various material prescriptions. Currently available are the ideal gas and EOS for the typical constituents of planets: rock, iron, water, and hydrogen/helium mixtures. With the examples of an equal mass merger between two Earth-like bodies and a mantle stripping GI on Mercury (resolved with up to 2 billion particles) we demonstrate the advantages of high-resolution SPH simulations for planet scale impacts.

Presenter(s)

Presenter

Thomas
Meier
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University of Zurich

I got a BSc. in Engineering in 2009 and a MSc. in Engineering in 2013 from the UAS of Technlogy in Buchs SG. I continued to work at the UAS in Buchs, doing project based technology transfer to industry partners. I then started to study physics at U of Zurich in 2016 and got a BSc. in Physics in 2020 and a MSc. in Physics in 2022. I now do my PhD at the Institute for Computational Science at the U of Zurich, studying planet scale collisions with hydrodynamical simulations.

Authors