Evaluation of the NASTRAN General Purpose Computer Program

NASTRAN is a large, general purpose, finite element computer program used primarily for linear structural analysis. In its ten years of existence, NASTRAN has achieved the distinction of being the program with the most users worldwide, most documentation, most user conferences, most cited, and probably the most expensive to develop. The four objectives of this study were to: (1) assess the current status (usage, documentation, trends) of public-domain versions of NASTRAN; (2) evaluate its program architecture, and compare it with some other general purpose codes; (3) survey its functional description, and comment on its capabilities/limitations and such items as matrix operations, eigenvalue extraction schemes, element library, material properties, etc; and (4) perform advanced evaluation exercises on some selected structural elements, and test their convergence, completeness, and efficiency.