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Executable Digital Twins (xDT) are starting a revolution in the industry, where high fidelity simulation models extend their usage from the design and validation phases to in-operation and service phase. Two critical technology blocks in this revolution are Model Order Reduction and Smart Virtual Sensing. The former allows the high-fidelity models to be represented in compact forms and the latter allows to extend the limits of physical sensors and provide full field data combining simulation models and test data in a real-time estimator framework. The smart virtual sensing technology leverages a state-of-the-art Kalman filtering approach to combine the simulation and physical testing. This allows to virtually measure locations that are not accessible with physical sensors due to e.g. physical constrains or high temperatures.

Real and virtual testing are extensively used tools in the product development cycle. Efficiency improvement demands on this development process, like cost and time reduction, usually presume the combination of testing with simulation even on the design stage of the component. This study aimed to demonstrate an example of how real measurements can be used as feedback loops in computer-aided engineering (CAE) analysis. For this purpose, a truck's suspension component, instrumented with strain gauges on its hotspots, has been tested in a proving ground track located in Brazil. Using nCode Designlife™ 9.0, virtual strain gauges have been placed in the component's finite element model and, with the measured forces inputs, theirs results were compared to the correspondents gauges on the real component.