Spatially varying tension in filament bending ($K_{\sigma }=A{\partial }_x^4-{\partial }_x(\sigma {\partial }_x)$)

Adding $\frac{1}{2}\int \sigma (x)(h^{\prime }{)}^{2}dx$ to the quadratic bending energy of an elastic filament contributes $-(\sigma h^{\prime }{)}^{\prime }$ to its variational derivative. The endpoint term is $A{h}^{\prime \prime }{\eta }^{\prime }+(\sigma h^{\prime }-A{h}^{\prime \prime \prime })\eta$. If the real filament tension vanishes at both ends, the usual self-adjoint endpoint conditions for filament bending remain valid. A complete eigenfunction expansion diagonalizes the energy even when the eigenfunctions have no explicit formula. Thermal equipartition theorem arguments require positive eigenvalues after fixing any kernel; strong compression can violate this requirement.