Element Analysis vs. Finite Element Analysis

please can someone help with the above title

OK - I'll take a stab:

I think you may mean Elemental Analysis, which is a way of determining the relative amounts of the elements in a particular substance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elemental_analysis

On the other hand, Finite-Element Analysis is a mathematical tool used to find approximate solutions to partial differential equations (among other things):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_element_method

Mike

As far as I know there is something callet element anlysis in structural analysis aswell. I didn't know that FEA was partial differential equations, I thought it was a structural analysis software aswell.

Much structure analysis requires the application of FEA and there is a lot of FEA software out there that is part of a specifically structural package.

FEA can be used in many other areas as well (computational fluid dynamics, CFD, is one).

What is for solid mechanics and structures as CFD is for fluid flow?, is the method called something specific when it is usen on structures?