Movers and shakers: Granular damping in microgravity

The response of an oscillating granular damper to an initial perturbation is studied using experiments performed in microgravity and granular dynamics simulations. High-speed video and image processing techniques are used to extract experimental data. An inelastic hard sphere model is developed to perform simulations and the results are in excellent agreement with the experiments. In line with previous work, a linear decay of the amplitude is observed. Although this behavior is typical for a friction-damped oscillator, through simulation it is shown that this effect is still present even when friction forces are absent. A simple expression is developed which predicts the optimal damping conditions for a given amplitude and is independent of the oscillation frequency and particle inelasticities.