Record Details

Kinetic Prefactors of Reactions on Solid Surfaces

ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University

Field Value
Title Kinetic Prefactors of Reactions on Solid Surfaces
Names Campbell, Charles T. (creator)
Árnadóttir, Liney (creator)
Sellers, Jason R. V. (creator)
Date Issued 2013-08-05 (iso8601)
Note This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by Walter de Gruyter GmbH and can be found at: http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/zpch.
Abstract Adsorbed molecules are involved in many reactions on solid surfaces that are of great technological
importance. As such, there has been tremendous effort worldwide to learn how to theoretically
predict rates for reactions involving adsorbed molecules. Theoretical calculations of rate constants
require knowing both their activation energy and prefactor. Recent advances in ab initio computational
methods (e.g., density functional theory with periodic boundary conditions and van der
Waals corrections) promise to soon provide activation energies for surface reactions with sufficient
accuracy to have real predictive ability. However, to predict reaction rates, we also need accurate
predictions of prefactors. We recently discovered that the standard entropies of adsorbed molecules
(S[superscript 0] [subscript ad]) linearly track the entropy of the gas-phase molecule at the same temperature (T), such that
S[superscript 0] [subscript ad] (T)=0.70 S[superscript 0] [subscript gas](T)−3.3 R (R=the gas constant), with a standard deviation of only 2 R over
a range of 50 R. This correlation, which applies only to conditions where their surface residence
times are shorter than ∼1000 s, provides a powerful new method for estimating the partition
functions for adsorbates and the kinetic prefactors for their reactions. For desorption, we show that
the prefactors obtained with DFT using transition state theory (TST) and the harmonic oscillator
approximation to get the partition function predicts prefactors for desorption that are of order
10³ times larger than experimental values while our approach gives much better estimates. We
also explore the applications of this approach to estimate prefactors within TST for the main
classes of adsorbate reactions: desorption, diffusion, dissociation and association, and discuss its
limitations. We discuss general issues associated with applying TST to rate laws and multi-step
mechanisms in surface chemistry, and argue that rates of adsorbate reactions which are often taken
to be proportional to coverage (θ) might better be taken as proportional to θ/(1−θ) (unless the
adsorbate forms islands), to account for the configurational entropy or excluded volume effects on
the adsorbate’s chemical potential.
Genre Article
Access Condition http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/
Topic Surface Reactions
Identifier Campbell, C. T., Árnadóttir, L., & Sellers, J. R. (2013). Kinetic Prefactors of Reactions on Solid Surfaces. Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie, 227, 1435-1454. doi:10.1524/zpch.2013.0395

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