What Is FEA?

This is a very broad subject. I would start by either googling it or looking it up on Wikipedia. There is so much information available on the web dealing with fea.

This link will take you to various articles from Mechanical Engineering that have to do with FEA.

I have been using ANSYS (an FEA program) for about 4 years. This link will take you to one of ANSYS's web pages where you can down load a copy of ANSYS advantage. This shows examples of different companies and how they have used FEA in solving engineering problems.

http://www.ansys.com/magazine/

ANSYS is not the only good fea program out there. Some other fea programs are ALGOR or COSMOS.

Not to overwhelm you but there is also CFD (Computational fluid dynamics) which is another type of numerical method for solving engineering problems dealing with fluid mechanics.

I wish you the best of luck with your searches.

Thank you very much, your comments and information will help me to understand better this topic.

Thanks again.

finite element analysis is the process of the discretization of 3D geometry of a physical part, a subsystem or an entire system such as a vehicle for full vehicle crash simulation. The 3D model is split up in to very small "finite elements" representing metals, plastics etc and then applying loading and boundary conditions in a simulation analysis model. A computational server is used to process the physics of the simulation model and the results are usually post processed in graphical environment. Large FEA models can be as large as 75,000,000 elements.

Chris Theisen