Sounds like a great idea to me. I had the FEA technique explained some
20 years ago and did not fully get it at that time, so I wont be of any
use here, but if you have any programming problems I am willing to help
out on that.
I think my biggest issue will be actually using GNUstep's and ObjC's tools to write this. I can write the beam and spring elements code in less than a week since it's what my program implemented, but I'll probably need to get a refresher course on surfaces (there's some cheap books on amazon that I can get). At this point I still need to decide what I need for each element, how to divide the library, etc.
Thanks for the support though, I really appreciate it!
Stefan