The vibration of rolling mill in rolling process and its harm to rolling equipment have become an international problem in steel rolling industry. The essence of the vibration behavior of a mechanical structure is the transfer of energy in the system. In this work, for a proposed particle damped absorber (PDA) applied to roll vibration control, the influences of the PDA parameters on the vibration transmission characteristics of the system and the energy consumption characteristics of particle groups are studied from the standpoint of energy mechanism. Considering the nonlinearity of rolling interface and particle impact, a non-smooth four-degree-of-freedom vertical vibration model is established. The vibration displacement and velocity of the system are obtained by the incremental harmonic balance method (IHBM). The influence laws of the stiffness coefficients and damping coefficients in the PDA on the power flow are investigated according to the solutions of the system at different excitation frequencies. The effects of particle parameters on the energy consumption behavior of the particle groups are investigated to reveal the energy dissipation mechanism of PDA by using PFC3D software. The results show that the power flow transfer in Roll-PDA system has the targeting performance. This means that the energy loss share of each mechanism in the PDA can be effectively controlled by adjusting the parameters of the PDA. The energy consumption of the particle group increases in step form, which is more obvious in the case of low frequency vibration. In addition, the effects of particle material, particle size, filling rate and particle mixing on vibration suppression of PDA are investigated by experiments. The experimental results are compared with the simulation results to verify the reliability of the established model and the validity of the theoretical analysis. The findings of this study can provide insight into the selection of parameters for PDAs applied to different excitation frequencies.