Our group is investigating the Evolution of Protoplanetary Accretion Disks including Chemistry and Transport Processes . According to our current understanding, planetary systems form in protoplanetary accretion disks. At late stages of the star formation process, conditions become favourable for the dust component in the disk to agglomerate first into km-sized planetesimals and by a complicated hierarchy of further growth process into planets. The simulation of the structure and evolution of protoplanetary accretion disks are a necessary prerequisite for understanding the formation of planetary systems. An important topic in this context is the study of the chemistry of gas and dust, the mineralogical and petrological properties of the dust, and of radial and vertical transport processes in the disc, since this determines the temporal evolution and radial distribution of the composition of the disk material, from which the planetary system bodies are formed.
Much emphasis is put on a versatile structure.
The fundamental modules of this software, handling grid generation and data administration, allow a comfortable implementation of all kinds of algorithms based on upwind-schemes on staggered grids. AG Abstract Services, vol. Abstracts of Contributed Talks and Posters presented at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Astronomische Gesellschaft, in Goettingen, 20-25 September 1999. Int. J. Numer.