Large deflections of a structurally damped panel in a subsonic flow

The large deflections of panels in subsonic flow are considered, specifically a fully clamped von Karman plate accounting for both rotational inertia in plate filaments and (mild) structural damping. The panel is taken to be embedded in the boundary of the positive half-space in R 3 containing a linear, subsonic potential flow. Solutions are constructed via a semigroup approach despite the lack of natural dissipativity associated with the generator of the linear dynamics. The flow–plate dynamics are then reduced—via an explicit Neumann-to-Dirichlet (downwash-to-pressure) solver for the flow—to a memory-type dynamical system for the plate. For the non-conservative plate dynamics, a global attractor is explicitly constructed via Lyapunov and recent quasi-stability methods. Finally, it is shown that, via the compactness of the attractor and finiteness of the dissipation integral, all trajectories converge strongly to the set of stationary states.