Ethylene adsorption on Ag(111), Rh(111) and Ir(111) by (meta)-GGA based density functional theory calculations

Abstract

Accurate description of the adsorption process of reactants on metal surfaces from theory is crucial for mechanistic understanding of activity and selectivity of metal catalysts, but it remains challengeable for the nowadays first-principles theory due to the lack of proper exchange-correlation functional describing the distinct interactions involved. We studied here the potential energy surfaces of ethylene adsorption on Ag(111), Rh(111) and Ir(111) using density functional theory calculations and (meta)-GGA functional including PBE, BEEF-vdW, SCAN, and SCAN+rVV10. For ethylene adsorption on noble metal Ag(111), it is found that BEEF-vdW, SCAN and SCAN+rVV10 predict the presence of the physisorption states only. For Rh(111), both SCAN and SCAN+rVV10 find that there is a precursor physisorption state before the chemisorption state. In contrast, there is no precursor state found based on potential energy surfaces from BEEF-vdW and PBE. Whereas for Ir(111), BEEF-vdW predicts the existence of a rather shallow precursor physisorption state, in addition to the chemisorption state. Irrespective to the transition metals considered, we find that SCAN+rVV10 gives the strongest binding strength, followed by SCAN, and PBE/BEEF-vdW, accordingly. The present work highlights great dependence of potential energy surface of ethylene adsorption on transition metal surfaces and exchange-correlation functionals.