Pulse Propagation in Granular Chains
Granular media can support excitations ranging from the very localized to the very dispersive. Experimental and numerical studies of pulse propagation in granular chains have helped
to understand energy propagation in these nonlinear discrete one-dimensional media. However, the predictive capability of most existing work has been limited by the dearth of analytic results. We introduce a binary collision approximation that yields quantitatively accurate analytic results for chains of different granular geometries, mass, and/or size distributions.
Katja Lindenberg, University of California, San Diego