I had some pcl where I was doing something with normals and calculating some results.
I created element vector results of <0 0 1> using the element coordinate system and then queried the result requesting the data in Coord 0 - hence getting the normal vectors.
I've stripped the PCL down to do just the normal bit and attached it. I'm not suggesting this is elegant but it may be of use to you. Currently it passed in a list of elements and returns an array of vectors. However it only returns as many vectors as there are 2D elements so you might want to return the 2D element ids as well. It doesn't clean up the groups and results it was creating/using etc so it is caveat emptor.
