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NASA NASTRAN is the NASA Structural Analysis System, a finite element analysis program (FEA) completed in the early 1970's. It was the first of its kind and opened the door to computer-aided engineering. Subsections of a design can be modeled and then larger groupings of these elements can again be modeled. NASTRAN can handle elastic stability analysis, complex eigenvalues for vibration and dynamic stability analysis, dynamic response for transient and steady state loads, and random excitation, and static response to concentrated and distributed loads, thermal expansion, and enforced deformations.

NASTRAN has been released under the NASA Open Source Agreement version 1.3.

Documentation

The original NASTRAN documentation was comprised of 4 documents: the Theoretical Manual, the User's Manual, the Programmer's Manual, and the Demonstration Guide. The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide equivalent references to the latter 3 documents. These manuals will be updated as the code is audited and modernized. This project is in the very preliminary stages, so the documents are more notes than reference.