Computing dust properties

A standard algorithm used to compute scattering and absorption properties by spherical dust particles is that provided by Bohren and Huffman (1983) (also known as bhmie). As part of the Hyperion development, we have written a wrapper around the improved version of bhmie.f developed by Bruce Draine that makes it easy to compute the dust properties for mixes of dust compositions and grain sizes. The program can be found here along with instructions for installation and usage.

Note that this code is only able to compute properties for simple spherical grains with no mantles.

Disclaimer

We cannot guarantee that the wrapper (or the original bhmie code) are bug-free - you should sign up to the mailing list to ensure that you are informed as soon as bugs are identified and fixed.

In order to be able to easily read computed properties into Hyperion, the easiest way is to set the format parameter to 2. Then, if the prefix and format are set to e.g.:

'my_dust' = prefix for results
2 = output format (see README)

You can create a Hyperion dust object with:

from hyperion.dust import BHDust
d = BHDust('my_dust')

and as described in Preparing dust properties, you can visualize and write out the dust object with:

d.plot('my_dust.png')
d.write('my_dust.hdf5')

Please let us know if you run into any issues!