A unified formulation of PVD-based finite cylindrical layer methods for functionally graded material sandwich cylinders

A unified formulation of finite cylindrical layer methods (FCLMs) based on the principle of virtual displacements (PVDs) is developed for the quasi-three-dimensional (3D) bending and free vibration analyses of simply-supported, functionally graded material (FGM) sandwich circular hollow cylinders, in which the material properties of the FGM layer are assumed to obey the power-law distributions of the volume fractions of the constituents through the thickness coordinate. In this formulation, the cylinder is divided into a number of cylindrical finite layers, where the trigonometric functions and Lagrange polynomials are used to interpolate the in- and out-of-surface variations of the displacement components of each individual layer, respectively. Because an h-refinement is adopted in this article to yield the convergent solutions, the relative orders used for expansion of the displacement components remain variable, and can be freely chosen as linear, quadratic and cubic ones. The accuracy and convergence rate of a variety of PVD-based FCLMs developed in this article are assessed by comparing their solutions with the available 3D ones.