Reply To: Reinf265 as steel wire reinfocements for spiral arrangements APDL

[John Doyle]

Perhaps smeared is sufficient, but it is really an engineering judgement as to which approach is best for your application. It depends on your specific objectives. 

As you know, smeared reinforcement is used to represent a distributed reinforcement within a material, while discrete reinforcement models individual reinforcing elements allowing for individual accounting of each fiber.  Discrete reinforcement is suitable for modeling fibers that are sparsely placed or have nonuniform properties.   Smeared reinforcement treats a layer of fibers with identical material, orientation, and cross-section area as a homogeneous membrane with unidirectional stiffness. 

It is important to understand these assumptions and decide which approximation best meets your engineering objectives.