Reflection and transmission due to the incident wave in one-dimensional bead chains when there are impurities have been studied. The impurities can be any kind of material, any size, and their numbers are arbitrary. The dependence of the transmission and the reflection on the numbers and the material parameters of the impurities are given. The analytical results are given by using the inverse scattering method. Substantial reflection is observed if there is only one steel bead. However, the reflection is negligible if there are two steel beads. The reflection monotonously increases as the numbers of the steel beads increase. The reflection remains a constant when the numbers of the steel beads are so many that the length composed by the steel beads is larger than the width of the solitary wave. It can be used to detect the impurities in the beads' chain by measuring the reflection of a pulse.

The paper work relates to Nesterenko's problem to further study the solitary wave when the strong external force acts on the granular chain. We also study the problem under the long-wavelength approximation and find that such kind of solitary wave in system with the initial prestress can be described by the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation. It is found that the results of analytical and numerical are in an excellent agreement. Furthermore, we study the scattering of the KdV solitary wave in different granular materials both in theoretical and numerical methods. It is found that the numbers and the amplitudes of both the reflected and the transmitted waves depend not only on the amplitude of the incident solitary wave but also on the variations of both sides of the discontinuity such as the mass, Young's modulus or radius of the grains. C 2016 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license