Mathematical analysis of a three-tiered food-web in the chemostat
Abstract
A mechanistic model describing the anaerobic mineralization of chlorophenol in a three-step food-web is investigated. The model is a six-dimensional system of ordinary differential equations. In our study, the phenol and the hydrogen inflowing concentrations are taken into account as well as the maintenance terms. The case of a large class of growth kinetics is considered, instead of specific kinetics. We show that the system can have up to eight types of steady states and we analytically determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for their existence according to the operating parameters. In the particular case without maintenance, the local stability conditions of all steady states are determined. The bifurcation diagram shows the behavior of the process by varying the concentration of influent chlorophenol as the bifurcating parameter. It shows that the system exhibits a bi-stability where the positive steady state can lose stability undergoing a supercritical Hopf bifurcation with the emergence of a stable limit cycle.
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