The knowledge of external loads acting on a vehicle is necessary in order to perform design analysis. While performing durability analysis for instance, the encountered loads due to the interaction with the road have to be known. Specific physical devices are normally used by test engineers in order to measure those quantities, but these devices have the disadvantage of being intrusive, expensive and time consuming to install. An appealing alternative is represented by the use of more general purpose sensors in combination with a structural model of the component on which the loads are applied. State estimation theory can be used in order to combine the experimental information coming from the sensors with simulation data coming from the model. This so-called virtual sensing approach for the estimation of loads is investigated in this paper. Numerical experiments in which a suspension multibody model generates virtual measurements are performed in order to assess the feasibility of the technique.
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