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The presence of engineering plastics in the automotive, aerospace, and defense industries is rapidly increasing; the lightweight and cost-effective nature of these materials, coupled with improvements to their mechanical performance, is driving the replacement of more traditional materials. However, the stiffness of engineering plastics cannot rival that of their metal counterparts, making metal replacement challenging in cases where stiffness is paramount. Nanometal-polymer hybrids, which are engineering plastics reinforced by a thin high-strength metal coating, provide an innovative solution to this problem. However, implementing this hybrid material into innovative designs remains a challenge, as relatively little information about mechanical behaviour or appropriate modeling techniques for this complex material are available. In this article, an efficient and effective finite element modeling approach for the structural analysis of nanometal-polymer hybrids is presented.