A system, method and software product for modeling spot welds in a finite
element analysis is described. The spots welds are represented by beam
elements or solid elements in accordance with an indicator flag. The flag
may also be specified as the number (e.g., an integer such as 1, 4, 8 or
16) of solid elements in a cluster representing spot weld. The solid
elements may include, but not limited to, hexahedron, tetrahedron, and
the likes. The number of solid elements and required nodes are generated
for each spot weld based on the indicator flag. A table is formed to
group the generated solid elements in a cluster together, so that the
force and moment resultants of the spot weld can be computed and
assembled in a file.