Bending and vibration of circular cylindrical beams with arbitrary radial nonhomogeneity

This paper presents a new approach for analyzing transverse bending and vibration of circular cylindrical beams with radial nonhomogeneity. The radial nonhomogeneity may be continuous or piecewise-constant, corresponding a functionally graded circular cylinder or a multi-layered circular cylinder, respectively. Different from the Euler–Bernoulli and Timoshenko theories of beams, our analysis considers shear deformation, but does not need to introduce a shear correction factor. Using the shear-stress-free condition at the surface of the cylinder, coupled governing equations for deflection and rotation angle are derived, and then converted to a single governing equation. The influences of gradient index on the deflection and stress distribution for cantilever and simply-supported beams are studied. Natural frequencies of free vibration of a cylindrical beam with circular cross-section are calculated for different power-law gradients. In particular, a circular cylindrical shell may be taken as a special case of a bi-layered cylinder where the material properties of the inmost cylinder vanish. For this case, the natural frequencies for simply-supported and clamped–clamped cylindrical shells are evaluated and compared with those using three-dimensional theory. Our results coincide well with the previous.