Functionally graded hollow cylinders with arbitrary varying material properties under nonaxisymmetric loads

•The load subjected to the functionally graded circular hollow cylinder is non-uniform.•The elastic properties of the cylinder can vary arbitrarily through the thickness.•The solutions are derived explicitly for both the plane strain and the plane stress problems.

A functionally graded circular hollow cylinder is studied analytically under arbitrarily non-uniform loads on the inner and outer surfaces. The elastic properties are assumed to vary arbitrarily through the thickness. By dividing the cylinder into some homogeneous sub-cylinders, the analytical solutions for the stresses and displacements are derived explicitly. Some numerical results, based on the presented analytical solutions, are provided to investigate the effects of material non-homogeneity on the distribution of the stresses under the non-uniform internal load. The results show that the behavior of the functionally graded cylinder under the nonaxisymmetric load has some special characteristics other than that of the uniformly pressurized one.