Reinforced materials are used extensively in civil engineering construction and composite structures. Use reinforcing elements to model reinforcing in either of two forms: cable (such as steel rebar in reinforced concrete) or fiber (such as the carbon fiber in fiber-reinforced composites). Regardless of the form, you can perform both a structural and a thermal analysis of the reinforcing.
Two methods are supported for modeling reinforcing cables or fibers:
For more information, see Reinforcing and Direct Element Embedding in the Structural Analysis Guide and the documentation for the reinforcing elements
(REINFnnn).
The discrete reinforcing method allows reinforcing fibers to be accounted for individually. This method is suitable for modeling sparsely placed fibers, or fibers with nonuniform properties, such as cross-section area, material, spacing, and orientation.
The discrete reinforcing element REINF264 is used to add individual fibers to 3D link, beam, shell and solid elements. The element supports both structural and thermal analysis. Multiple reinforcing fibers are allowed in a single element.
The smeared reinforcing method is suitable for modeling clusters of reinforcing fibers appearing in layer or sheet form. Each layer of fibers is simplified as a homogeneous membrane having unidirectional stiffness.
Fibers in the same layer must have uniform cross-section, material, spacing, and orientation.
The smeared reinforcing elements are:
REINF263 -- Used with 2D solids such as plane stress, plane strain, axisymmetric and generalized plane strain, and axisymmetric shell elements. The element supports structural analysis only.
REINF265 -- Used with 3D solid and shell elements. The element supports both structural and thermal analysis.