Global asymptotic behavior in chemostat-type competition models with delay

The asymptotic behavior of solutions of a chemostat-type model in which two species compete for a limiting nutrient supplied at a constant rate is considered. The model incorporates a general nutrient uptake function and two distributed delays. The first delay models the fact that the nutrient is partially recycled after the death of the biomass by bacterial decomposition and the second indicates that the growth of the species depends on the past concentration of the nutrient. Furthermore, it is assumed that there is interspecific competition between the two species as well as intraspecific competition within each species. Conditions for boundedness of solutions and existence of nonnegative equilibria are given. By constructing appropriate Liapunov-like functionals, some sufficient conditions for global attractivity of the positive equilibrium is obtained. The combined effects of the two different delays are studied. The main results of Freedman and Xu [H.I. Freedman, Y. Xu, Models of competition in the chemostat with instantaneous and delayed nutrient recycling, J. Math. Biol. 31 (1993) 513–527] and Ruan and He [S. Ruan, X.-Z. He, Global stability in chemostat-type competition models with nutrient recycling, SIAM J. Appl. Math. 58 (1) (1998) 170–192] are improved and extended.