Re: FEM - an understanding

>If anyone has some spare time (as we all do) could they visit the
>site, critique and/or suggest a path for further education on this
>topic.

Not too bad--in fact very useful for the newbie. Some of the FEA vocabulary items might not be familiar here over the water, but it's a fine way to begin the brush-up. If you're serious about learning to run problems, start here:
http://www.engr.usask.ca/~macphed/finite/fe_resources/fe_resources.html It's the best FEA site on the web. There's FEA freeware around ranging from simple frame problems to some 2D and 3D genuine FEA software. FELT is a pretty good one, but htere are plenty more. Shareware is not so elegant as some of the commercial packages, but still very good and will let you concentrate on the basics while you get your feet wet. Many of the commercial packages have demo versionas, some time-bombed, others capacity limited to 50 or 100 nodes. They'll that'll let you get a feel for real world use of the software.

My own feeling about learning to use it is to get out a strength of materials book and start working the demo problems. The very best book for this is Timoshenko's Strength of Materials although pretty much tied with Den Hartog's 'Advanced Strength of Materials (buy them second-hand on the web). Besides learning to handle your errors you'll get a very good brush-up on your basic mechanics as it applies to FEA use.

Christopher Wright P.E.    |"They couldn't hit an elephant at
chrisw@skypoint.com        | this distance"   (last words of Gen.
___________________________| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania 1864)