An ab initio study of CO adsorption on ceria(110)

An Insight into Geometries and Catalytic Applications of CeO2 from a DFT Outlook

Rare earth metal oxides (REMOs) have gained considerable attention in recent years owing to their distinctive properties and potential applications in electronic devices and catalysts. Particularly, cerium dioxide (CeO2), also known as ceria, has emerged as an interesting material in a wide variety of industrial, technological, and medical applications. Ceria can be synthesized with various morphologies, including rods, cubes, wires, tubes, and spheres. This comprehensive review offers valuable perceptions into the crystal structure, fundamental properties, and reaction mechanisms that govern the well-established surface-assisted reactions over ceria. The activity, selectivity, and stability of ceria, either as a stand-alone catalyst or as supports for other metals, are frequently ascribed to its strong interactions with the adsorbates and its facile redox cycle. Doping of ceria with transition metals is a common strategy to modify the characteristics and to fine-tune its reactive properties. DFT-derived chemical mechanisms are surveyed and presented in light of pertinent experimental findings. Finally, the effect of surface termination on catalysis by ceria is also highlighted.

Vibrational Frequencies of Cerium-Oxide-Bound CO: A Challenge for Conventional DFT Methods

In ceria-based catalysis, the shape of the catalyst particle, which determines the exposed crystal facets, profoundly affects its reactivity. The vibrational frequency of adsorbed carbon monoxide (CO) can be used as a sensitive probe to identify the exposed surface facets, provided reference data on well-defined single crystal surfaces together with a definitive theoretical assignment exist. We investigate the adsorption of CO on the CeO_{2}(110) and (111) surfaces and show that the commonly applied DFT(PBE)+U method does not provide reliable CO vibrational frequencies by comparing with state-of-the-art infrared spectroscopy experiments for monocrystalline CeO_{2} surfaces. Good agreement requires the hybrid DFT approach with the HSE06 functional. The failure of conventional density-functional theory (DFT) is explained in terms of its inability to accurately describe the facet- and configuration-specific donation and backdonation effects that control the changes in the C─O bond length upon CO adsorption and the CO force constant. Our findings thus provide a theoretical basis for the detailed interpretation of experiments and open up the path to characterize more complex scenarios, including oxygen vacancies and metal adatoms.

The influence of the Hubbard U parameter in simulating the catalytic behaviour of cerium oxide

The seemingly unique redox and oxygen storage properties of cerium oxide (ceria) lead to broad practical application. However, the theoretical treatment of ceria can be troublesome due to the localised nature of the f-electrons and the self-interaction error associated with Density Functional Theory (DFT). DFT + U has been a widely used method to correct for these errors when probing specific physical material properties. However, due to the empirical nature of the U correction it is not immediately obvious that correcting certain bulk properties leads to the correct description of catalytic reactivity at surfaces. We propose an approach to choosing the U parameter using adsorption properties that provides a consistent method to simulate catalytic properties of ceria. We go on to show that combining the derived ceria energetics with those of adsorption at metal surfaces, allow us to construct transition metal-oxide pairings to develop a redox screening model for catalysis.

A DFT study on carbon monoxide adsorption onto hydroxylated α-Al₂O₃(0001) surfaces

The adsorption of CO onto the hydroxylated α-Al2O3(0001) surface was studied using density functional theory (DFT). Dissociated adsorption of water was found to be stable, with an adsorption energy (Ea) of 1.62 eV at θ(water) = 0.75. The most stable hydroxylation form on the clean surface was found to be in the 1-2 dissociation configuration, where the OH group binds to a surface Al ion and the H ion binds to one of the three equivalent surface O ions. The adsorption energy of CO was found to be dependent on the degree of pre-hydroxylation of the surface as well as on the CO coverage. The highest adsorption energy of CO was found when θ(CO) = 0.25 on a pre-hydroxylated surface with θ(water) = 0.25; Ea = 0.57 eV. The adsorption energy of CO decreased upon increasing the degree of pre-hydroxylation. The vibrational frequency of ν(CO) was also computed and in all cases it was blue shifted with respect to gas-phase CO. The shift, Δν, decreased with increasing CO coverage but increased with increasing surface hydroxylation. A comparison with available experimental work is discussed.

Carbon dioxide activation and dissociation on ceria (110): a density functional theory study

Ceria (CeO(2)) is a promising catalyst for the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO(2)) to liquid fuels and commodity chemicals, in part because of its high oxygen storage capacity, yet the fundamentals of CO(2) adsorption, activation, and reduction on ceria surfaces remain largely unknown. We use density functional theory, corrected for onsite Coulombic interactions (GGA+U), to explore various adsorption sites and configurations for CO(2) on stoichiometric and reduced ceria (110), the latter with either an in-plane oxygen vacancy or a split oxygen vacancy. We find that CO(2) adsorption on both reduced ceria (110) surfaces is thermodynamically favored over the corresponding adsorption on stoichiometric ceria (110), but the most stable adsorption configuration consists of CO(2) adsorbed parallel to the reduced ceria (110) surface at a split oxygen vacancy. Structural changes in the CO(2) molecule are also observed upon adsorption. At the split vacancy, the molecule bends out of plane to form a unidentate carbonate with the remaining oxygen anion at the surface; this is in stark contrast to the bridged carbonate observed for CO(2) adsorption at the in-plane vacancy. Also, we analyze the pathways for CO(2) conversion to CO on reduced ceria (110). The subtle difference in the energies of activation for the elementary steps suggest that CO(2) dissociation is favored on the split vacancy, while the reverse process of CO oxidation may favor the formation of the in-plane vacancy. We thus show how the structure and properties of the ceria catalyst govern the mechanism of CO(2) activation and reduction.

Molecular electrostatic potential at the atomic sites in the effective core potential approximation

Considering calculations of the molecular electrostatic potential at the atomic sites (MEP@AS) in the presence of effective core potentials (ECP), we found that the consequent use of the definition of MEP@AS based on the energy derivative with respect to nuclear charge leads to a formula that differs by one term from the result of simple application of Coulomb's law. We have developed a general method to analytically treat derivatives of ECP with respect to nuclear charge. Benchmarking calculations performed on a set of simple molecules show that our formula leads to a systematic decrease in the error connected with the introduction of ECP when compared to all-electron results. Because of a straightforward implementation and relatively low costs of the developed procedure we suggest to use it by default.