New high endurance sliding material for bridge bearings

PTFE has been the state of the art material for sliding bridge bearings for more than 40 years, due to its exceptionally low coefficient of friction. Nowadays recent developments in bridge design and increasing traffic conditions have posed more severe requirements on wear life and load carrying capacity that are no longer matched by PTFE. Therefore a special sliding material, Xlide®, has been developed and proposed to replace PTFE in bridge bearings. The tests carried out on the special material show that lubricated with silicon grease Xlide® can support larger pressure levels and sustain longer accumulated sliding paths than PTFE does, and has a low coefficient of friction even at very low temperatures, out of the range of application of PTFE. Finally, the coefficient of friction of Xlide® is not affected by the pressure level and velocity of sliding within typical service ranges for bridge bearings