Nonautonomous chemostats with variable delays

Abstract

The appearance of delay terms in a chemostat model can be fully justified since the future behavior of a dynamical system does not in general depend only on the present but also on its history. Sometimes only a short piece of history provides the relevant influence (bounded or finite delay), while in other cases it is the whole history that has to be taken into account (unbounded or infinite delay). In this paper a chemostat model with time variable delays and wall growth, hence a nonautonomous problem, is investigated. The analysis provides sufficient conditions for the asymptotic stability of nontrivial equilibria of the chemostat with variable delays, as well as for the existence of nonautonomous pullback attractors.