Theoretical and Experimental Study of Rotational Behaviour of Friction Pendulum Bearings

Friction Pendulum Bearing (FPB for short) is a kind of widely used device to improve seismic capacities of building and bridge structures. Despite the considerable progress made in developing theoretical models to understand the mechanical behaviour of FPB, these models mostly focus on the horizontal movement behaviour and rarely on the rotational behaviour of FPB. However, rotational displacements of FPBs indeed will occur along with horizontal displacements in earthquakes and may affect the structural seismic performance. Motivated from these findings, a theoretical model of FPB that describes the rotational behaviour is established based on the moment balance theory in this paper. A set of rotational tests are carried out to validate the theoretical model, and comparisons of experimental and theoretical results show that they are in good agreement. The theoretical model developed in this paper will help understand the structural seismic performance more accurately in the case of rotations of FPBs.