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The DUNS code is a research code developed at the Propulsion Engineering Research Center at Penn State University in the mid to late 1990's. The object of the DUNS code was to make a CFD code both flexible and fairly general, and made great strides in that area compared with other codes I worked on while at Penn State, but it remains primarily a research code and does not have the same level of testing or validation that commercial codes have. We made it available on the internet at the request of some people because it can be applied to many different problems, but we were never able to devote the resources and manpower needed to make it truly user friendly and maintain it, or to do a complete set of validations to ensure that it runs correctly on a wide range of problems, especially for people who have little or no experience with CFD. It should certainly not be used as a replacement for commercial packages such as FLUENT, unless the people using it have considerable experience with CFD.

The DUNS code has been developed using FORTRAN77 and C. Because of this, and because of our interest in writing an efficient solver, the actual code is very difficult to read, with very little documentation. Some documentation is provided by the tutorial in terms of variable names, but this is fairly limited. Chances are that this documentation is not going to improve, unless someone (other than myself) ends up documenting it.

As a research code, we cannot provide any support or offer any guarantees that the program will provide useful or even correct answers. It is up to the researcher to determine whether the program is operating correctly or not for the given problem. Example problems are provided that should help the user understand the capabilities and limitations of the DUNS code.

So what does the DUNS code do?

• Structured, multi-block grids
• Gas-phase multi-species and reacting flows
• Turbulent flows with q-omega turbulence model
• Unsteady flows using dual time-stepping procedure
• Supersonic, subsonic, low Mach number compressible flows
• Incompressible flows, however, this is not well tested and may not behave well

So what does the DUNS code not do?

• DUNS does not provide any grid generation. Sorry, you are on your own for this (see FAQ for more details.)
• DUNS does not do deformable grids.
• DUNS does not do unstructured meshes at all.
• DUNS does not provide much plotting.

Please read the FAQ for more information about the DUNS code, and to determine whether it would be useful for your research or not. If you are interested in looking at the DUNS code, feel free to download it from sourceforge

Happy Computing!

Douglas Schwer