Catalysis at Metal/Oxide Interfaces: Density Functional Theory and Microkinetic Modeling of Water Gas Shift at Pt/MgO Boundaries

The impact of metal/oxide interfaces on the catalytic properties of oxide-supported metal nanoparticles is a topic of longstanding interest in the field of heterogeneous catalysis. The significance of the metal/oxide interaction has been shown to vary according to both the inherent reactivity of the metal nanoparticle and the properties of the oxide support, with effects such as the metal d-band center, the nanoparticle shape, and the reducibility of the oxide believed to contribute to the overall system reactivity. In recent years, the water gas shift (WGS) reaction, wherein carbon monoxide and water are converted to carbon dioxide and hydrogen, has emerged as a model chemistry to probe the molecular-level details of how catalysis can be promoted in such environments, and this reaction is the focus of the present contribution. Using a combination of periodic Density Functional Theory calculations and microkinetic modeling, we present a comprehensive analysis of the WGS mechanism at the interface between a quasi-one dimensional platinum nanowire and an irreducible MgO support. The nanowire is lattice matched to the MgO support to remove spurious strain at the metal/oxide interface, and reactions both on the nanowire and at the three-phase boundary itself are considered in the mechanistic analysis. Additionally, to elucidate the consequences of adsorbate–adsorbate interactions on the WGS chemistry, an ab-initio thermodynamic analysis of CO coverage is performed, and the impact of the higher coverage CO states on the reaction chemistry is explicitly evaluated. These results are combined with detailed calculations of adsorbate entropies and dual-site microkinetic modeling to determine the kinetically significant features of the WGS reaction network which are subsequently, validated through experimental measurements of apparent reaction orders and activation barrier. The analysis demonstrates the important role that the metal/oxide interface plays in the reaction, with the water dissociation step being facile at the interface compared to the pure metal or oxide surfaces. Further, explicit consideration of CO interactions with other adsorbates at the metal/oxide interface is found to be central to correctly determining reaction mechanisms, rate determining steps, reaction orders, and effective activation barriers. These results are captured in a closed-form Langmuir–Hinshelwood model, derived from a simplified version of the complete microkinetic analysis, which reveals, among other results, that the celebrated carboxyl mechanism of Mavrikakis and coworkers is the governing pathway when accounting for reaction-relevant CO coverages.