Effectiveness of classical rolling pendulum bearings

During the last decades, Pendulum Bearings with one or more concave sliding surfaces have been dominating bridge structures. For bridges with relative small lengths, the use of classical pendulum bearings could be a simple and cheaper solution. This work attempts to investigate the effectiveness of such a system, and especially its behavior for the case of a seismic excitation. The results obtained have shown that the classical pendulum bearings are very effective, mainly for bridges with short or intermediate length.