In this paper a general approach for studying the motion of a cantilever beam interacting with a 2D fluid flow is presented. The fluid is solved by a general purpose commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package (FLUENT 6.2), while the structure is managed by means of a dedicated finite element method solver, coded in FLUENT as a user-defined function (UDF). A weak fluid structure interaction coupling scheme is adopted exchanging information at the end of each time step. An arbitrary cantilever beam can be introduced in the CFD mesh with its wetted boundaries specified; the cantilever can also interact with specified rigid and flexible walls through use of a non-linear contact algorithm. After a brief review of relevant scientific contributions, some test cases and application examples are presented.