  Recent years have shown many advances in our knowledge of the collisional
evolution of protoplanetary dust. Based on a variety of dust-collision
experiments in the laboratory, our view of the growth of dust aggregates in
protoplanetary disks is now supported by a deeper understanding of the physics
involved in the interaction between dust agglomerates. However, the parameter
space, which determines the collisional outcome, is huge and sometimes
inaccessible to laboratory experiments. Very large or fluffy dust aggregates
and extremely low collision velocities are beyond the boundary of today's
laboratories. It is therefore desirable to augment our empirical knowledge of
dust-collision physics with a numerical method to treat arbitrary aggregate
sizes, porosities and collision velocities. In this article, we implement
experimentally-determined material parameters of highly porous dust aggregates
into a Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) code, in particular an
omnidirectional compressive-strength and a tensile-strength relation. We also
give a prescription of calibrating the SPH code with compression and
low-velocity impact experiments. In the process of calibration, we developed a
dynamic compressive-strength relation and estimated a relation for the shear
strength. Finally, we defined and performed a series of benchmark tests and
found the agreement between experimental results and numerical simulations to
be very satisfactory. SPH codes have been used in the past to study collisions
at rather high velocities. At the end of this work, we show examples of future
applications in the low-velocity regime of collisional evolution.

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics