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For decades, the industry standard for laboratory durability simulations has been based on reproducing quantified vehicle responses. That is, build a running vehicle, measure its responses over a variety of durability road surfaces and reproduce those responses in the laboratory for durability evaluation. To bring a vehicle to market quickly, the time between tightening the last bolt on a prototype test vehicle and starting the durability evaluation test must be minimized. A method to derive 4-Post simulator displacements without measuring or predicting vehicle responses is presented.

Automotive engineering development processes are growing more dependent on the use of multi-body dynamic (MBD) models for generating vehicle loads that at one time could only be measured using physical hardware. A certain technique combines these two approaches using a minimal set of physical measurements to excite a vehicle MBD model for predicting loads at various vehicle interfaces. This approach eliminates the use of a tire model, often the roadblock in MBD-based loads prediction simulations. However, for various reasons, the direct application of loads to a model can lead to problems with the simulation. Alternatively, the model can be artificially constrained but this also has its disadvantages. The purpose of this paper is to present a loads prediction technique that relaxes the use of artificial boundary conditions for applications involving the input of measurements to an MBD model.