  An immersed boundary method for the fluid--structure--thermal interaction in
rarefied gas flow is presented. In this method, the slip model is incorporated
with the penalty immersed boundary method to address the velocity and
temperature jump conditions at the fluid--structure interface in rarefied gas
flow within slip regime. In this method, the compressible flow governed by
Navier-Stokes equations are solved by using high-order finite difference
method; the elastic solid is solved by using finite element method; the fluid
and solid are solved independently and the fluid--structure--thermal
interaction are achieved by using a penalty method in a partitioned way.
Several validations are conducted including Poiseuille flow in a 2D pipe, flow
around a 2D NACA airfoil, moving square cylinder in a 2D pipe, flow around a
sphere and moving sphere in quiescent flow. The numerical results from present
method show good agreement with the previous published data obtained by other
methods, and it confirms the the good ability of the proposed method in
handling fluid--structure--thermal interaction for both weakly compressible and
highly compressible rarefied gas flow. To overcome the incapability of
Navier-Stokes equations at high local Knudsen numbers in supersonic flow, an
artificial viscosity is introduced to ease the sharp transition at the shock
wave front. Inspired by Martian exploration, the application of proposed method
to study the aerodynamics of flapping wing in rarefied gas flow is conducted in
both 2D and 3D domains, to obtain some insights for the flapping-wing aerial
vehicles operating in Martian environment.
