A ug 2 00 3 Classical Cepheid Pulsation Models : IX . New Input Physics

We constructed several sequences of classical Cepheid envelope models at solar chemical composition (Y = 0.28, Z = 0.02) to investigate the dependence of the pulsation properties predicted by linear and nonlinear hydrodynamical models on input physics. To study the dependence on the equation of state (EOS) we performed several numerical experiments by using the simplified analytical EOS originally developed by Stellingwerf and the recent analytical EOS developed by Irwin. Current findings suggest that the pulsation amplitudes as well as the topology of the instability strip marginally depend on the adopted EOS. To compromise between accuracy and numerical complexity we computed new EOS tables using the Irwin analytical EOS. We found that the difference between analytical and tabular thermodynamic quantities and their derivatives are smaller than 2% when adopting suitable steps in temperature and density. To improve the numerical accuracy of physical quantities we are now adopting