The SAUNA advanced CFD system (using GEMS as the Graphical User Interface) enables rapid, high accuracy modelling of aero- and hydrodynamic cases using structured multiblock grids. Development, validation and extensive use of the SAUNA code, with challenging military and civil airframes, has been central to aerodynamics work at the QinetiQ, formerly the UK Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, for more than 15 years.
The multiblock topology generation is automated through an interactive process to determine block decomposition, component associated embedding, block dimensioning, etc. SAUNA can handle complex configurations and interactions, such as wing, body, pylon and nacelle.
Surface elliptic grids are generated at each of the airframe and farfield surfaces as well as "control" planes in the field. The surface grids can be edited interactively within GEMS, giving the capability to redefine point distributions along block boundaries to maximise grid quality. An elliptic field grid is generated within the domain between these bounding surface grids.
SAUNA offers finite volume inviscid (Euler) and viscous (viscous coupled Euler or Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes) flow solvers using multi-grid convergence acceleration techniques.