Qualitative analysis of a chemostat model with inhibitory exponential substrate uptake

In this paper, we consider a simple chemostat model involving a single species feeding on redundant substrate with a constant yield term. Many experiments indicate that very high substrate concentrations actually inhibit growth. Instead of assuming the prevalent Monod kinetics for growth rate of cells, we use a non-monotonic functional response function to describe the inhibitory effect. A detailed qualitative analysis about the local and global stability of its equilibria (including all critical cases) is carried out. Numerical simulations are performed to show that the dynamical properties depend intimately upon the parameters. 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.