Energy transport in one-dimensional disordered granular solids

TL;DR

This study explores how energy moves through one-dimensional disordered granular chains, revealing different transport behaviors depending on the nonlinearity level and initial conditions, including localization, detrapping, and shock-like propagation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive numerical analysis of energy transport regimes in disordered granular chains, highlighting the effects of nonlinearity and initial conditions on energy spreading.

Findings

Energy spreading increases with nonlinearity.

Weakly nonlinear regime shows no clear asymptotic spreading behavior.

Highly nonlinear regime exhibits shock-like, ballistic energy transport.

Abstract

We investigate the energy transport in one-dimensional disordered granular solids by extensive numerical simulations. In particular, we consider the case of a polydisperse granular chain composed of spherical beads of the same material and with radii taken from a random distribution. We start by examining the linear case, in which it is known that the energy transport strongly depends on the type of initial conditions. Thus, we consider two sets of initial conditions: i) an initial displacement and ii) an initial momentum excitation of a single bead. After establishing the regime of sufficiently strong disorder, we focus our studies on the role of nonlinearity for both sets of initial conditions. By increasing the initial excitation amplitudes we are able to identify three distinct dynamical regimes with different energy transport properties: a near linear, a weakly nonlinear and a highly nonlinear regime. Although energy spreading is found to be increasing for higher nonlinearities, in the weakly nonlinear regime no clear asymptotic behavior of the spreading is found. In this regime, we additionally find that energy, initially trapped in a localized region, can be eventually detrapped and this has a direct influence on the fluctuations of the energy spreading. We also demonstrate that in the highly nonlinear regime, the differences in energy transport between the two sets of initial conditions vanish. Actually, in this regime the energy is almost ballistically transported through shock-like excitations.