  We consider the action of exact plane gravitational waves, or pp-waves, on
free particles. The analysis is carried out by investigating the variations of
the geodesic trajectories of the particles, before and after the passage of the
wave. The initial velocities of the particles are non-vanishing. We evaluate
numerically the Kinetic energy per unit mass of the free particles, and obtain
interesting, quasi-periodic behaviour of the variations of the Kinetic energy
with respect to the width $\lambda$ of the gaussian that represents the wave.
The variation of the energy of the free particle is expected to be exactly
minus the variation of the energy of the gravitational field, and therefore
provides an estimation of the local variation of the gravitational energy. The
investigation is carried out in the context of short bursts of gravitational
waves, and of waves described by normalised gaussians, that yield impulsive
waves in a certain limit.
