FEA of sails and rig

I want to model sail forces from the sail itself (acting on the luff, head and clew) with an FEA package. Has anyone used or can recommend an FEA package that has the facility to do this .

So far, the only suggested solution has been a net of elastic cables (allows non-linear analysis) in std fea packages like Strand7/Struas7.
Forces could be entered at itersection nodes taken from general pressure distribution maps.

Interested to see what others have tried and how the results measured up.
As for hand checking the results...........

Cheers

 

Ideally you want an aero-eleastic program such as Relax that will deflect the sails based on the aerodynamic loads it calculates.

Have a look in the July Seahorse magazine for the article on the author of Relax, Peter Hepple.

 

Do a google on Q-sail or Northsail + Membrain ...

 

Membrain and North SailS, correction. Have a look here:

http://www.fluent.com/about/news/newsletters/03v12i2/a14.htm

Bart