By Tony Abbey, Technical Manager, Noran Engineering, Inc. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) was developed in the Aircraft Industry in the late 1950's as a way of handling the more complex structures that were evolving. Finite Element analysis has been used in the maritime industry for many years. Lloyds Register and other certification authorities were very early adopters of the technique. The NASTRAN FEA code was developed by NASA in the early 1960's to standardize FEA methods across contractors for the major Aerospace projects such as the Moon program and F-111. It was commercialized in the early 1980's. NE NASTRAN was introduced in the mid 1990's with the emphasis on the PC environment to avoid the expense of the mainframe computing bottlenecks that many large contractors were experiencing.
