Evaluating Thermal Corrections for Adsorption Processes at the Metal/Gas Interface
International audience; Adsorption and desorption steps are key for active catalysts and rely on a subtle balance between enthalpic and entropic terms. While the enthalpic term is becoming ever more accurate through density functional development, the entropic term remains underrated and its precise determination a great challenge. In this work, we have performed extensive first principles thermodynamic integration (TI) simulations for the 1 adsorption of small (e.g., CO) to larger (e.g., phenol) molecules at metallic surfaces and compared their adsorption free energies to the values obtained by vertical, static statistical mechanics approximations to thermal corrections invoking three diff…
Enhanced kinetics of hole transfer and electrocatalysis during photocatalytic oxygen evolution by cocatalyst tuning
Understanding photophysical and electrocatalytic processes during photocatalysis in a powder suspension system is crucial for developing efficient solar energy conversion systems. We report a substantial enhancement by a factor of 3 in photocatalytic efficiency for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) by adding trace amounts (∼0.05 wt %) of noble metals (Rh and Ru) to a 2 wt % cobalt oxide modified Ta3N5 photocatalyst particulate. The optimized system exhibited high quantum efficiencies (QEs) of up to 28 and 8.4% at 500 and 600 nm in 0.1 M Na2S2O8 at pH 14. By isolation of the electrochemical components to generate doped cobalt oxide electrodes, the electrocatalytic activity of cobalt oxide …
Force Field for Water over Pt(111): Development, Assessment, and Comparison
Metal/water interfaces are key in many natural and industrial processes, such as corrosion, atmospheric, or environmental chemistry. Even today, the only practical approach to simulate large interfaces between a metal and water is to perform force-field simulations. In this work, we propose a novel force field, GAL17, to describe the interaction of water and a Pt(111) surface. GAL17 builds on three terms: (i) a standard Lennard-Jones potential for the bonding interaction between the surface and water, (ii) a Gaussian term to improve the surface corrugation, and (iii) two terms describing the angular dependence of the interaction energy. The 12 parameters of this force field are fitted again…
Molecular mechanics models for the image charge, a comment on “including image charge effects in the molecular dynamics simulations of molecules on metal surfaces”
We re-investigate the image charge model of Iori and Corni (Iori and Corni, J. Comput. Chem. 2008, 29, 1656). We find that a simple symmetrization of their model allows to obtain quantitatively correct results for the electrostatic interaction of a water molecule with a metallic surface. This symmetrization reduces the magnitude of the electrostatic interaction to less than 10% of the total interaction energy. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.