In this work, we study the wave propagation in a recently proposed acoustic structure, the locally resonant granular crystal. This structure is composed of a one-dimensional granular crystal of hollow spherical particles in contact, containing linear resonators. The relevant model is presented and examined through a combination of analytical approximations (based on ODE and nonlinear map analysis) and of numerical results. The generic dynamics of the system involves a degradation of the well-known traveling pulse of the standard Hertzian chain of elastic beads. Nevertheless, the present system is richer, in that as the primary pulse decays, secondary ones emerge and eventually interfere with it creating modulated wavetrains. Remarkably, upon suitable choices of parameters, this interference "distills" a weakly nonlocal solitary wave (a "nanopteron"). This motivates the consideration of such nonlinear structures through a separate Fourier space technique, whose results suggest the existence of such entities not only with a single-side tail, but also with periodic tails on both ends. These tails are found to oscillate with the intrinsic oscillation frequency of the out-of-phase motion between the outer hollow bead and its internal linear attachment.

A new method is introduced for the simulation of multiple impacts in granular media using the Kuwabara-Kono (KK) contact model, a nonsmooth (not Lipschitz continuous) extension of Hertz contact that accounts for viscoelastic damping. We use the technique of modified equations to construct time-discretizations of the nondissipative Hertz law matching numerical dissipation with KK dissipation at different consistency orders. This allows us to simulate dissipative impacts with good accuracy without including the nonsmooth KK viscoelastic component in the contact force. This tailored numerical dissipation is developed in a general framework, for Newtonian dynamical systems subject to dissipative forces proportional to the time-derivative of conservative forces. Numerical tests are performed for the simulation of impacts in Newton’s cradle and on alignments of alternating large and small balls. Resulting wave phenomena (oscillator synchronization, propagation of dissipative solitary waves, oscillatory tails) are accurately captured by implicit schemes with tailored numerical dissipation, even for relatively large time steps.