Title: Study of Minimum Door Closing Speed Analysis Method
text: 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.