In chennai and aeronautics circuit, I have heard lot about NASTRAN and catia, pro E. People recommend this to all aeronautical engineers and I have even seen it mentioned in many foreign university syllabus for BE and ME in aerospace. And moreover every job listing I saw on aeronautics demanded NASTRAN know-how. So I began my investigation as to what is NASTRAN and guess what I got a very good link It really explains the basics. Do check out.
And yes for those who have read Mr. John D Anderson's book will find that he has touched many of the basics of NASTRAN in his books... so read on and be enlightened!!!
NASTRAN, the NASA Structural Analysis System, is a powerful general purpose finite element analysis (FEA) program for use in computer-aided engineering. NASTRAN is a standard in the structural analysis field, providing the engineer with a wide range of modeling and analysis capabilities. Development of NASTRAN was initiated in the mid-1960's by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to provide an FEA capability for its aerospace research projects. Over the years, NASA has actively maintained and improved NASTRAN such that it remains a state-of-the-art structural analysis system.
NASTRAN applications include almost every kind of structure and construction. Structural and modeling elements are provided for the specific representation of the more common types of structural building blocks including rods, beams, shear panels, plates, and shells of revolution. More general types of building blocks can be treated by combining these simple elements or by using the "general" element capability. The substructuring capability allows different sections of a structure to be modeled jointly after having already been modeled separately.
NASTRAN permits the effects of control systems, aerodynamic transfer functions, and other nonstructural features to be incorporated into the solution of the structural problem. Among other analysis capabilities, NASTRAN can handle:
static response to concentrated and distributed loads, thermal expansion, and enforced deformations,dynamic response to transient and steady-state sinusoidal loads, and random excitation, complex eigenvalue determination for vibration analysis, dynamic stability analysis, and elastic stability analysis.
NASTRAN also has a limited capability for the solution of nonlinear problems, including piecewise linear analysis of nonlinear static response and transient analysis of nonlinear dynamic response. Users may develop their own analysis capabilities by using the Direct Matrix Abstraction Programming (DMAP) language to direct NASTRAN in the solution of general matrix problems.
Two types of NASTRAN licenses are available for some destination platforms. Source Code licenses, which are available for all supported platforms, include the source code, executables, demonstration problems and a four-volume set of documentation which includes the Programmer's Manual. Executable Code Only licenses are also available.
source::
http://www.openchannelfoundation.org/projects/NASTRAN/Related links
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