Positive steady states of a class of power law systems with independent decompositions

Abstract

Power law systems have been studied extensively due to their wide-ranging applications, particularly in chemistry. In this work, we focus on power law systems that can be decomposed into stoichiometrically independent subsystems. We show that for such systems where the ranks of the augmented matrices containing the kinetic order vectors of the underlying subnetworks sum up to the rank of the augmented matrix containing the kinetic order vectors of the entire network, then the existence of the positive steady states of each stoichiometrically independent subsystem is a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of the positive steady states of the given power law system. We demonstrate the result through illustrative examples. One of which is a network of a carbon cycle model that satisfies the assumptions, while the other network fails to meet the assumptions. Finally, using the aforementioned result, we present a systematic method for deriving positive steady state parametrizations for the mentioned subclass of power law systems, which is a generalization of our recent method for mass action systems.