About Finite Elements
Background
Analysis tools that supported World War II aerospace technology were not adequate to meet the design challenge of high-performance aircraft with swept wings. This led to a revolution in predictive analysis begun at Boeing by Turner, Clough and their colleagues. Ray Clough coined the term "finite elements" to describe the new analysis technology.
In a very short time after the appearance of Turner's seminal paper on finite elements, every aerospace company in the United States developed its own proprietary finite element program. Each of these programs was promoted by its developers, but none was available as a commercial product.
Finite elements and the parallel development of digital computers, provided designers with new insight on how loads are carried in a swept wing and led to the detailed design of weight-efficient structures for transonic, and eventually, supersonic flight. The general purpose nature of finite elements was quickly recognized as the new type of analysis spread across the remaining manufacturing industries and into architecture and engineering of large buildings, power engineering and civil engineering projects.
NASA Steps Forward
In the early 1960s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) determined that a large scale finite element-based program was needed for designing the space system for lunar exploration. NASA's goal was to develop a structural analysis system to solve large problems that use the best currently available algorithms for solving matrix equations and eigenvalue analysis and run on all major computers of that era.
To satisfy this need, a NASA team headed by a visionary named Tom Butler developed a set of specifications and a project to develop an innovative, general purpose analysis system. The new system was called NASA Structural Analysis System, or NASTRAN®.

FEA Today
Today, finite element analysis (FEA) is the main technology supporting the computer-aided engineering (CAE) segment of the virtual product development (VPD) application software industry that is estimated to reach $850 million in revenues during 2004.