With the development of manufacturing industry, the need for structures to withstand higher loads has been increased. Pre-stressed structures under compressive pre-loads offer solution in such cases. Pre-stressed created in these structures can resist the major or even full part of the working load. The main goal is to improve the load carrying capacity in comparison with non-prestressed structure which often has another benefit, i.e. improvement of fatigue life by decreasing mean stress in loading and unloading cycles. In the present research, by reviewing methods of pre-stressing cylindrical sections and non-cylindrical sections, the design of two main types of pre-stressed structures were studied. Various methods of pre-stressing of structures and also means of pre-stressing were studied and compared. Closed form solutions available in literature were compared with finite element results for both cylindrical and non-cylindrical sections and the two sets of results were shown to be in agreement. For pre-stressed layered dies, as an example of pre-stressed cylindrical sections, pre-stressing process and the stress state at working conditions were simulated using the following two methods. In the first method, simulation was based on modeling all layers and stress state of die state was considered during pre-stressing process. In this method, pre-stresses in the die body and layers were applied equally using equivalent thermal strains. The results were shown to be in agreement with the analytical results. In the second method, layers are considered as a single part and pre-stresses are applied by finding a uniform temperature field which is applied to the part that models all layers. This temperature field is calculated by analytical equations. In this method, only the final state of die after pre-stressing can be studied. For pre-stressed press body, as an example of pre-stressed non-cylindrical section, a preliminary mechanical design procedure is discussed. By using results of this design, simulation can be run to verify the safety of preliminary design. The simulation is carried out first by a 2D model and considering layers as a whole part. Results showed that this model was not accurate enough because the stiffness is overestimated when layers are modeled as a single part. To improve this simple model, layers were considered as separate parts and simulation was run again. A comparison between results of single part modeling of layers and multi part modeling of them showed that there was a considerable difference and therefore modeling layers as separate parts was required. It was also shown that there was no need to model all layers and several layers could be modeled as a part. In fact, a large number of wires were modeled as a single part and then the number of wires was decreased in each simulation until the results were shown to be independent of the number of wires. In order to verify the assumption of 2D simulations, 3D modeling of press body was also studied. Again in 3D simulations, layers were modeled as both one single part and several parts. The results of 3D simulation were shown to be in good agreement with the 2D simulations of press body. It can be concluded, in such cases preliminary designs and simulations can be carried out using 2D layered model. Keywords: Pre-stressed Structures, Compressive Pre-stress, Finite Element Method, Stress Analyses, Mechanical Design.