0000000000349704
AUTHOR
Andrey S. Bazhenov
Unraveling the Role of the Rh–ZrO2 Interface in the Water–Gas-Shift Reaction via a First-Principles Microkinetic Study
The industrially important water–gas-shift (WGS) reaction is a complex network of competing elementary reactions in which the catalyst is a multicomponent system consisting of distinct domains. Herein, we have combined density functional theory calculations with microkinetic modeling to explore the active phase, kinetics, and reaction mechanism of the WGS over the Rh–ZrO2 interface. We have explicitly considered the support and metal and their interface and find that the Rh–ZrO2 interface is far more active toward WGS than Rh(111) facets, which are susceptible to CO poisoning. CO2 forming on the zirconia support rapidly transforms into formate. These findings demonstrate the central role of…
Adsorption and Activation of Water on Cuboctahedral Rhodium and Platinum Nanoparticles
Rh and Pt are widely used as the components in heterogeneous catalysts for multiple industrial applications. Because the metals are typically in the form of nanoparticles in real catalysts, it is important to carefully select models for the computational prediction of the catalytic properties. Here we report a first-principles study on the water activation, an important step in numerous catalytic reactions, using the finite-size Rh and Pt nanoparticle models and compare them to the extended surface models. We show that regardless of the model, adsorption and activation of water is practically identical for both metals, whereas the dissociation is energetically more favorable on Rh. The expe…
DFT Prediction of Enhanced Reducibility of Monoclinic Zirconia upon Rhodium Deposition.
Oxides are an important class of materials and are widely used, for example, as supports in heterogeneous catalysis. In a number of industrial catalytic processes, oxide supports actively participate in chemical transformations by releasing lattice oxygen anions. While this is intuitively understood for reducible oxides, the reducibility of irreducible oxides may be modified via nanoengineering or upon inclusion of foreign species. Our calculations predict that the ability of irreducible monoclinic zirconia to release oxygen improves substantially upon deposition of rhodium. Through a comprehensive screening of Rh/ZrO2 with different size of the rhodium species, we find that a Rh adatom and…
Structure and dynamics of CaO films: A computational study of an effect of external static electric field
Oxide films play a significant role in a wide range of industrial fields, mostly due to the thickness-dependent variation of their properties. Recently, it has been proposed based on the experimental study that carrier transport in CaO films proceeds via strong phonon excitations with a variable signal depending on the film thickness. In this paper, we report a detailed investigation in the frame of the density functional theory of structural and electronic properties of freestanding and Mo(100)-supported CaO films, as well as phonons therein, as functions of the film thickness and intensity of the external static electric field. Our calculations demonstrate that phonon frequencies negligib…
Globally Optimized Equilibrium Shapes of Zirconia-Supported Rh and Pt Nanoclusters: Insights into Site Assembly and Reactivity
Metal–support interfaces form an active site for many important catalytic reactions. The modeling of these interfacial sites calls for approximations to set up a structure model, which in turn may ...