Feedback-mediated coexistence and oscillations in the chemostat (Q928341)

The authors discuss the dynamics of microbial competition in the chemostat which is controlled by means of state dependent feedback. They consider the class of feedbacks where the dilution rate is a positive affine function of the microbial concentrations. In case of two species it is shown that the parameters of the feedback function may be varied in such away that the system undergoes a Hopf bifurcation. When the growth of the species obeys Michaelis-Menten kinetics the bifurcation is supercritical in the relevant parameter region, and the bifurcating periodic solutions for two species are always stable, which might, under the addition of a third species, bifurcate into the coexistence region via a transcritical bifurcation.