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The door closing effort is one of the first impressions to customer's mind about the engineering and quality of the vehicle. The door closing force and the minimum door closing speed are two important characteristics for evaluation. But we can obtain these two indices only by experiments and/or subjective assessments. To predict the door closing effort by the simulation method during the design phase, a finite element analysis model is established. The compression load deflection behavior of seals is converted to the parameters of constitutive model of seals by the parameters identification method. Then, the seal resistance force and the minimum door closing speed are calculated. The later correlates very well with the experiment data.

Stiffness is one of the key points for research and development of vehicle body in white (BIW). Fast and effective evaluation of stiffness is very important for reducing the time and cost of research and development. How to realize weight reduction with proper stiffness is also a focus point of automobile design. In general, commercial software is used to optimize the BIW design. But the optimization process is time consuming. Therefore a simple but effective tool for fast evaluation is desired. A method to evaluate stiffness with sensitivity coefficients of sheet metal thickness of body structure is proposed in this paper. The simple mathematical relation of the sensitivity coefficients, the thickness variation of sheet metals, and the stiffness of body structure is established. The stiffness can be evaluated quickly for various combination of sheet metal thickness without running large-scale simulation using commercial software.

The minimum door closing speed is an important target in vehicle door design. Engineers need a proper method to evaluate the door closing speed during the design phase. Analytical approaches are presented to solve the difficult issues in analyzing the minimum door closing speed. First, the weather strip is simplified into a discrete model with several spring elements. This method does not need to use 3-D contact analysis for the weather strip and can save computing time with acceptable accuracy. Second, the minimum closing speed is solved by using the energy equation which needs one iteration only. The method has high efficiency and can be used to evaluate the door closing speed effectively during the design phase.