Host: The Japanese Society for Planetary Sciences: Local Organizing Committee for 2006 Fall Meeting
Coagulation and fragmentation processes of dust aggregates by their mutual collisions in a protoplanetary disk are important to understand planetesimal formation. Recently we carried out numerical simulations of dust aggregate collisions and obtained results on the processes of aggregate compression and disruption almost consistent with those by Dominik and Tielens (1997). These simulations, however, were restricted to the head-on collision. Since offset collisions are thought to be common in dust aggregate collisions, we have to evaluate the effect of offset collisions on the aggregate structure. In this study, we carry out 3-D numerical simulations of BCCA aggregate collisions with various values of impact parameter. Through the results on the gyration radius of aggregate and the number of contacts per particle in an aggregate, we discuss the effect of offset collision on the dust aggregate structure.
