INTRODUCTION F OLLOWING Haden’s1#{176}demonstration of the close correlation between spherocytosis and the fragility of erythrocytes to hypotonic saline, Dameshek and Miller5 postulated that spherocytosis was a preliminary stage in the destruction of the red cell; i.e. partial hemolysis. They were able to show experimentally that the degree of spherocytosis was related to the concentration of h...

A precise and highly reproducible method for analyzing the osmotic fragility of erythrocytes with a minute amount of blood (less than 10 mul) is described. The osmotic fragility curves are recorded with a coil planet centrifuge with accessories and a scanning photodensitometer. The recorded curves are transcribed by a DuPont Curve Resolver and their components are analyzed. Normal fragility cur...

New performance-based earthquake engineering methods developed by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, the Applied Technology Council, and others include damage analysis at a highly detailed level, requiring the compilation of fragility functions for a large number of damageable generic structural and nonstructural components. This brief paper presents the development of a fragil...

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...

The concept of fragility provides a possibility to rank different supercooled liquids on the basis of the temperature dependence of dynamic and/or thermodynamic quantities. We recall here the definitions of kinetic and thermodynamic fragility proposed in the last years and discuss their interrelations. At the same time we analyze some recently introduced models for the statistical properties of...

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...

The concept of 'fragility' constitutes a central point of the glass transition science serving as the 'universal' metric linking previtreous dynamics of qualitatively distinct systems. Finding the fundamental meaning of fragility is the 'condicio sine qua' for reaching the long expected conceptual breakthrough in this domain. This report shows that fragility is determined by the ratio between t...

Lenders condition future loans on some index of past performance. Typically, banks condition future loans on repayments of earlier obligations while international organizations condition future loans on the implementation of some policy conditions. We build an agency model that accounts for these tendencies to offer an explanation for why both types of conditionality clause may coexist. The opt...

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...