Traveling waves in a bio-reactor model with stage-structure

In this paper the existence and non-existence of traveling wave solutions are established for a bio-reactor model with stage-structure. The method to prove the existence of wave solutions is to construct an invariant cone of initial functions defined in a large but bounded domain, to apply a fixed point theorem on this cone and then extend to the unbounded spatial domain R by a limiting argument. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.