Energy absorption and recovery in tapered granular chains: Small chains and low tapering

Shock absorption traditionally exploits visco-elastic devices, fluid viscous dampers and friction dampers, or "soft" materials. Recent work on impulse propagation in granular assemblies suggests that it may be possible to absorb shock waves using a different variety of shock absorbers and thus unlock the possibility of building structures that are significantly more shock absorbent than is currently possible, an issue of relevance to concerns of security. These new shock absorbers are composed of granular materials and exploit the nonlinear energy propagation properties in assemblies of granular materials. They have the potential to partially recover the energy of the absorbed shock waves for useful purposes, a property that might allow one to design devices to convert the incident energy to other useful forms. The basic physics of the "tapered chain shock absorber" is briefly discussed in this work.