  We have experimentally investigated the bouncing behavior and damping
performance of a container partially filled with granular chains, namely a
chain-filled damper. The motion of the chain-filled damper, recorded by a
particle tracing technology, demonstrates that the granular chains can
efficiently absorb the collisional energy of the damper. We extract both the
restitution coefficient of the first collision and the total flight time to
characterize the dissipation ability of the damper. Two containers and three
types of granular chains, different in size, stiffness and restitution
coefficient, are used to examine the experimental results. We find that the
restitution coefficient of the first collision of a single-chain-filled damper
can linearly tend to vanish with increasing the chain length and obtain a
minimum filling mass required to cease the container at the first collision (no
rebound). When the strong impact occurs, the collisional absorption efficiency
of a chain-filled damper is superior to a monodisperse-particle-filled damper.
Furthermore, the longer the chains are, the better the dissipative effect is.
