We study an elliptic-parabolic system of partial differential equations describing formation of biological network structures. The model takes into consideration the evolution of the permeability tensor under the influence of a diffusion term, representing randomness in the material structure, a decay term describing metabolic cost and a pressure force. A Darcy's law type equation describes the pressure field. In the spatially two-dimensional setting, we present a constructive, formal derivation of the PDE system from the discrete network formation model in the refinement limit of a sequence of unstructured triangulations. Moreover, we show that the PDE system is a formal L 2gradient flow of an energy functional with biological interpretation, and study its convexity properties. For the case when the energy functional is convex, we construct unique global weak solutions of the PDE system. Finally, we construct steady state solutions in one-and multi-dimensional settings and discuss their stability properties.
We demonstrate the validity of Murray's law, which represents a scaling relation for branch conductivities in a transportation network, for discrete and continuum models of biological networks. We first consider discrete networks with general metabolic coefficient and multiple branching nodes and derive a generalization of the classical 3/4-law. Next we prove an analogue of the discrete Murray's law for the continuum system obtained in the continuum limit of the discrete model on a rectangular mesh. Finally, we consider a continuum model derived from phenomenological considerations and show the validity of the Murray's law for its linearly stable steady states.
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