Global dynamics of the buffered chemostat for a general class of response functions
Abstract
We study how a particular spatial structure with a buffer impacts the number of equilibria and their stability in the chemostat model. We show that the occurrence of a buffer can allow a species to setup or on the opposite to go to extinction, depending on the characteristics of the buffer. For non-monotonic response function, we characterize the buffered configurations that make the chemostat dynamics globally asymptotically stable, while this is not possible with single, serial or parallel vessels of the same total volume and input flow. These results are illustrated with the Haldane kinetic function.