The Decorated Tapered Chain as a Granular Shock Absorber

A 1$D$ alignment of progressively shrinking spherical grains (a tapered chain) turns out to be an excellent impulse absorber with rich nonlinear dynamical behavior. Here we discuss a tapered chain with interstitial grains between every sphere of the original tapered chain and demonstrate analytically (using the hard sphere approximation), numerically and experimentally that the shock absorption ability of the ``decorated" system is far superior to that of the system without the interstitial grains.