In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the development and implementation of energy dissipation devices for seismic protection. These devices play a crucial role in enhancing the seismic performance of structural systems by mitigating the damaging effects of seismic excitation. This investigation presents a comprehensive numerical study on the dynamic response of energy dissipation devices based on bistable components. The aim of this study is to investigate to which extent the performance of the structural systems can be improved by installing energy dissipation devices that are able to switch between two stable equilibrium states under dynamic loads. This switch between the two stable positions occurs at very large velocities and this can increase the amount of energy dissipated by viscous damping.