  The response of an oscillating granular damper to an initial perturbation is
studied using experiments performed in microgravity and granular dynamics
mulations. 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.
The granular damper behaves like a frictional damper and a linear decay of the
amplitude is bserved. This is true even for the simulation model, where
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.
