Global Well-Posedness and Asymptotic Behavior for a Reaction-Diffusion System of Competition Type

TL;DR

This paper studies a reaction-diffusion model for microbial competition, proving global existence of solutions, conditions for blow-up, and analyzing steady-states and species coexistence through numerical simulations.

Contribution

It establishes global well-posedness under broad conditions, identifies blow-up scenarios, and explores steady-states and coexistence in a biologically motivated reaction-diffusion system.

Findings

Global classical positive solutions exist under general growth assumptions.

Finite time blow-up can occur with large yield coefficients.

Numerical simulations illustrate effects of motility and flocculation rates on species coexistence.

Abstract

We analyze a reaction-diffusion system describing the growth of microbial species in a model of flocculation type that arises in biology. Existence of global classical positive solutions is proved under general growth assumptions, with flocculation and deflocculation rates polynomially bounded above, that guarantee uniform sup norm bounds for all time t obtained by an $L^{p}-$energy functional estimate. We also show finite time blow up can occur when the yield coefficients are large enough. Also, using arguments relying on the spectral and fixed theory, we show persistence and existence of nonhomogenous population steady-states. Finally, we present some numerical simulations to show the combined effects of motility coefficients and the flocculation-deflocculation rates on the coexistence of species.