  The long-term behaviour of solutions to a model for acoustic-structure
interactions is addressed; the system is comprised of coupled semilinear wave
(3D) and plate equations with nonlinear damping and critical sources. The
questions of interest are: existence of a global attractor for the dynamics
generated by this composite system, as well as dimensionality and regularity of
the attractor. A distinct and challenging feature of the problem is the
geometrically restricted dissipation on the wave component of the system. It is
shown that the existence of a global attractor of finite fractal dimension --
established in a previous work by Bucci, Chueshov and Lasiecka (Comm. Pure
Appl. Anal., 2007) only in the presence of full interior acoustic damping --
holds even in the case of localised dissipation. This nontrivial generalization
is inspired by and consistent with the recent advances in the study of wave
equations with nonlinear localised damping.
