One of the serious damages of tremendous earthquakes is the damage to bridges as the major components in an    arterial road network, as relief operation is interrupted following cutting roads. Regardless of the magnitude and severity of an earthquake, other factors are also important in the strength and seismic performance of concrete bridges. Freezing-thawing cycles are among the factors, whi...

This research presents an alternative means of calculating vulnerability relations for buildings. Simulation-based fragility curves generated using a Monte Carlo simulation are usually not practical because of the large number of time-consuming analyses needed to obtain reliable statistics of the outcomes. This research implements a response surface metamodel to approximate complex analysis in ...

BACKGROUND hip fractures are an increasing source of morbidity and mortality in older people. The role of visual function tests such as visual impairment, stereopsis, contrast sensitivity and visual field defects in low fragility hip fractures in Asian populations is not well understood. OBJECTIVE to determine the association between various visual function tests and low fragility hip fractur...

A magnetostriction oscillator has been used for determining the relative fragility of human red cells to 9000 cycle vibrations under some different environmental conditions. The destruction of the cells is a logarithmic function of time according to the equation See PDF for Equation. Hypertonic saline solution, saponin, preheating, alcohol, and ether in subhemolytic concentrations decrease the ...

We derive an analytical expression showing that the fragility of a supercooled liquid is a result of (i) a thermodynamic term depending on change in configurational entropy and (ii) a kinetic term depending on change in the nonexponentiality or "stretching" of the relaxation function, as quantified by the exponent beta of the Kohlrausch-Williams-Watts (KWW) relaxation function. Our expression i...

The Applied Technology Council is adapting PEER’s performance-based earthquake engineering methodology to professional practice. The methodology’s damage-analysis stage uses fragility functions to calculate the probability of damage to facility components given the force, deformation, or other engineering demand parameter (EDP) to which each is subjected. This paper introduces a set of procedur...

For nonpolymeric supercooled liquids, the empirical correlation m = 56Tg DeltaCp(Tg)/DeltaHm provides a reliable means of correlating dynamic and thermodynamic variables. The dynamics are characterized by the fragility or steepness index m and the glass transition temperature Tg, while thermodynamics enter in terms of the heat capacity step DeltaCp at Tg and the melting enthalpy DeltaHm. The co...

Despite extensive efforts, a definitive picture of the glass transition of ultra-thin polymer films has yet to emerge. The effect of film thickness h on the glass transition temperature T(g) has been widely examined, but this characterization does not account for the fragility of glass-formation, which quantifies how rapidly relaxation times vary with temperature T. Accordingly, we simulate sup...

This paper represents the first effort in seismic fragility analysis of a structure using a structural analysis model developed on the basis of measured vibration data. An instrumented highway bridge is used to demonstrate the analysis procedure involving measuring ambient vibration, identifying modal parameters from the measured data, updating a preliminary FE model (obtained from structural d...