Monte carlo simulations of drop growth by coalescence and collision-induced breakup

Abstract

A Monte Carlo framework to simulate the evolution of drop spectra by coalescence and collision-induced breakup is presented. The stochastic algorithm of Gillespie [1] for chemical reactions in the formulation proposed by Laurenzi and Diamond [2] was used to simulate the kinetic behavior of the drop population. Within Gillespie's framework, the collision-induced breakup process is modeled as a new ``chemical reaction''. The results of the Monte Carlo simulations were compared with the analytical solution to the collection-breakup equation obtained by Feingold et al. [3], for an exponential distribution of satellite drops, and a constant collection and breakup kernels. A good correspondence between the analytical and the stochastic algorithm was found for this case.