One of the typical pain points in doing an FEA on long and thin models is that most automatic meshers will not create a mesh that will yield accurate results. A good example of this might be with trusses or similar structures.

Autodesk Algor includes a couple types of elements that can help us solve these situations. One is truss elements and the other is beam elements. These element types let us define the properties of the structural members in the design while only using line geometry to define the form.