  In this paper we study the interaction problem between a nonlinear
thermoelastic plate and a compressible viscous fluid with the adiabatic
constant $\gamma>12/7$. The existence of a weak solution for this problem is
obtained by constructing a time-continuous operator splitting scheme that
decouples the fluid and the structure. The fluid sub-problem is given on a
fixed reference domain in the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) formulation,
and the continuity equation is damped on this domain as well. This allows the
majority of the analysis to be performed on the fixed reference domain, while
the convergence of the approximate pressure is obtained on the physical domain.
