A plastic pipe reinforced by cross helically wound steel wires (PSP) is composed of highstrength steel wire and high density polyethylene (HDPE). In traditional mechanical analysis model, steel wires and HDPE are considered as linear elastic materials, and the composite structure is simplified to orthotropic laminated plates, but linear elastic analysis may result in relatively large error when the nonlinear performance of PSP is eminent. Therefore, a new finite element model of PSP was established with separately modeling steel wires and HDPE, and the nonlinear properties of constituents were taken into account. In the PSP failure analysis process, the maximum stress failure criterion was utilized. Groups of shortterm burst tests of PSP were carried out to validate the proposed model.The results show that the calculated results of the nonlinear model agree well with the experimental results.