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The ability to controllably chlorinate metal-oxide surfaces can provide opportunities for designing selective oxidation catalysts. In the present study, we investigated the surface chlorination of IrO2(110) by HCl using temperature programmed reaction spectroscopy (TPRS), x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. We find that exposing IrO2(110) to HCl, followed by heating to 650 K in ultrahigh vacuum, produces nearly equal quantities of on-top and bridging Cl atoms on the surface, Clt and Clbr, where the Clbr atoms replace O-atoms that are removed from the surface by H2O formation. After HCl adsorption at 85 K, only H2O desorbs at low Cl coverages during TPRS, but HCl begins to desorb in increasing yields as the Cl coverage is increased above about 0.5 monolayer (ML). The desorption of Cl2 was not observed under any conditions, in good agreement with the high barrier for this reaction predicted by DFT. A maximum Cl coverage of 1 ML, with nearly equal coverages of Clt and Clbr atoms, could be generated by reacting HCl with IrO2(110) in UHV. Our results suggest that a kinetic competition between recombinative HCl and H2O desorption under the conditions studied limits the saturation Cl coverage to a value less than the 2 ML maximum predicted by thermodynamics. XPS further shows that the partitioning of Cl between the Clt and Clbr states can be altered by subjecting partially chlorinated IrO2(110) to reductive or oxidative treatments, demonstrating that the Cl site population can change dynamically in response to the gas environment. Our results provide insights for understanding the chlorination of IrO2(110) by HCl and can enable future experimental studies to determine how Cl-modification alters the surface chemical reactivity of IrO2(110) and potentially enhances selectivity toward partial oxidation chemistry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dopants have the potential to locally modify water-olivine interactions, which can impact geological processes, such as weathering, CO2 sequestration, and abiotic hydrocarbon generation. As a first step in understanding the role of dopants on the water structure and chemistry at water-olivine interfaces, water monomer adsorption on alkaline earth (AE) and transition metal (TM) doped forsterite(010) [Mg2SiO4(010)] surfaces was studied using density functional theory (DFT). Dopants that occur in olivine minerals were considered and consisted of Ca, Sr, and Ba for the AE dopants and Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, and Ni for the TM dopants. The water molecule adsorbs on the olivine surface through a metal-water bond (Me–Ow) and a hydrogen bond with an adjacent surface lattice oxygen (Ox–Hw). A frontier orbital analysis reveals that the 1b2, 3a1, and 1b1 (HOMO) of the water molecule are involved in the bonding. All of the TM dopants show strong net Me–Ow covalent bonding between 3a1 and 1b1 water orbitals and TM d states, while the AE dopants except for Mg2SiO4(010) show negligible Me–Ow covalent bonding. Both the AE and TM dopants show similar hydrogen bonding features involving both the 1b2 and 3a1 orbitals. While the AE cations show an overall lower Me–Ow covalent interaction, the AE dopants have strong electrostatic interactions between the positive metal cation and the negatively charged water dipole. A bonding model incorporating a linear combination of the covalent Me–Ow bond, the Ox–Hw hydrogen bond, the electrostatic interaction between the dopant cation and the H2O molecule, and the surface distortion energy is needed to capture the variation in the DFT adsorption energies on the olivine surfaces. The bonding analysis is able to identify the dominant contributions to water-dopant interactions and can serve as a basis for future studies of more realistic water-olivine interfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Density functional theory was used to study CO adsorption on thin Pt metal films supported on SrO- and TiO2-terminated SrTiO3(100) surfaces. Regardless of substrate-termination, significant enhancement in CO binding occurred on the Pt monolayer compared to the bulk Pt(100) surface. We also observed CO-coverage dependent shifting of Pt atoms, influenced by the nature of underlying oxide atoms. These oxide-induced effects become negligible after depositing more than 2 monolayers of Pt. Evaluating the electronic structures of oxide-supported Pt showed that the interaction of filled Pt dxz+yz and empty Pt dz² states with CO molecular orbitals can be directly related to CO adsorption on the Pt/SrTiO3(100) surface. A hybrid d-band model is able to capture the CO adsorption trends for systems that do not show large lateral distortion except for the case of Pt adsorbed above the Sr atom on the SrO-termination. For this case, charge transfer from adjacent Pt atoms leads to a large filled dz2 peak below the Fermi level that weakens the Pt-CO s bonding due to Pauli repulsion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We used conventional density functional theory (DFT) and dispersion-corrected DFT (DFT-D3) calculations to investigate C-H bond activation pathways for methane and ethane σ-complexes adsorbed on the PdO(101) surface. The DFT-D3 calculations predict lower and more physically realistic values of the apparent C-H bond cleavage barriers, which are defined relative to the gas-phase energy level, while giving nearly the same energy differences between stationary states as predicted by conventional DFT for a given reaction pathway. For the stable CH4 η2 complex on PdO(101), DFT-D3 predicts that the C-H bond cleavage barriers are 55.2 and 16.1 kJ/mol relative to the initial molecularly adsorbed and gaseous states, respectively. We also predict that dehydrogenation of the resulting CH3 groups and conversion to CH3O species are significantly more energetically demanding than the initial C-H bond activation of CH4 on PdO(101). Using DFT-D3, we find that an η2 and an η1 ethane complex can undergo C-H bond cleavage on PdO(101) with intrinsic energy barriers that are similar to that of the methane complex, but with apparent barriers that are close to zero. We also investigated the dissociation kinetics of methane and ethane on PdO(101) using microkinetic models, with parameters derived from the DFT-D3 relaxed structures. We find that a so-called 3N - 2 model, in which two frustrated adsorbate motions are treated as free motions, predicts desorption pre-factors and alkane dissociation probabilities that agree well with estimates obtained from the literature. The microkinetic simulations demonstrate the importance of accurately describing entropic contributions in kinetic simulations of alkane dissociative chemisorption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]