A physical prototype of the engine mounting lug that was studied earlier is placed in a test laboratory and subject to an external service loading environment. A hardware strain gauge rosette is placed on the prototype in a strategic location near a suspected failure location and the strain time history is captured.

The prototype is also created as a finite element model. A software strain gauge is created in the same location as that of the physical prototype. FE results are extracted and converted to the same coordinate system as the rosette. A subsequent fatigue analysis is done on both the physically measured strain time history and that simulated by the finite element model for comparison and correlation purposes.