Solitary waves in alignment of elastic beads have been an important area of study. An important and rich area has been the behavior of solitary waves at a boundary, where features such as localization, anomalous behavior in scattering and transmission, quasiequilibrium phase, etc. are being studied. An application area of significance is the design of artificial granular alignments for shock decimation and dispersion. In this review article, we first present a summary and background of these unique features, and some designs in 1D which exploit these features. We further discuss some extensions to higher dimensional systems and their impact decimation ability. © 2017 World Scientific Publishing Company.