Global stability in chemostat-type equations with distributed delays

Authors

Xue-Zhong He, Shigui Ruan and Huaxing Xia

Status

Research Report 96-34
Date: October 1996

Abstract

We consider a chemostat-type model in which a single species feeding on a limiting nutrient supplied at a constant rate. The model incorporates a general nutrient uptake function and two distributed (infinite) delays. The first delay models the fact that the nutrient is partially recycled after death of biomass by bacterial decomposition and the second delay indicates that the growth of the species depends on the past concentration of nutrient.

By constructing appropriate Liapunov-like functionals, we obtain sufficient conditions for local and global stability of the positive equilibrium of the model. Quantitative estimates on the size of the delays for local and global stability are also obtained with the help of the Liapunov-like functionals. The technique we use in this paper may be used as well to study global stability of other types of physical models with distributed delays.

Key phrases

Chemostat-type equations. distributed delay. Liapunov functionals. local and global stability. nutrient recycling.

AMS Subject Classification (1991)

Primary: 34K15, 34K20, 45J05, 92A15
Secondary:

Content

The paper is available in the following forms:

TeX dvi format:: 1996-34.dvi.gz (23kB) or 1996-34.dvi (69kB)
PostScript:: 1996-34.ps.gz (57kB) or 1996-34.ps (195kB)

To minimize network load, please choose the smaller gzipped .gz form if and only if your browser client supports it.

Sydney Mathematics and Statistics