Weak solution to the incompressible viscous fluid and a thermoelastic plate interaction problem in 3D

In this paper we deal with a nonlinear interaction problem between an incompressible viscous fluid and a nonlinear thermoelastic plate. The nonlinearity in the plate equation corresponds to nonlinear elastic force in various physically relevant semilinear and quasilinear plate models. We prove the existence of a weak solution for this problem by constructing a hybrid approximation scheme that, via operator splitting, decouples the system into two sub-problems, one piece-wise stationary for the fluid and one time-continuous and in a finite basis for the structure. To prove the convergence of the approximate quasilinear elastic force, we develop a compensated compactness method that relies on the maximal monotonicity property of this nonlinear function.